Alphonse the Homunculus Slayer
by argentia-writes
Summary: He looked up at Al with eyes as flat as dull gold coins,shadowed and empty, and Al knew. He felt every hair on his body stand up on end and his hands curl into fists when the thing's eyes narrowed. A too-wide grin split Ed's familiar face,and his voice rang out, sounding like multiple voices all at once, "Oh, but you two succeeded, didn't you? Isn't that what you wanted?"
1. Preface

_"Amestrian texts throughout the ages have referenced the daemon…sometimes called by their titles of Devil, Incubus or Succubus…though no reference, in quantity, has exceeded that of the Homunculus, omnipresent in every myth of Daemons. Described as beings of unimaginable power…[the Amestrian concept of the]Homunculus is the fodder of legends. Ancient texts dating back to the original conception of the mythical ruins of Xerxes show humanlike beasts possessing alchemically impossible powers beyond all reaches of logical conception…The everlasting rule of Equivalent Exchange seems to be of little consequence to the immortal demons called Homunculi.'_

A Study of Ancient Alchemical Lore and Laws, _Joseph Kaube, 1873._

[Across the page of a leather-bound notebook, loopy writing scrawls illegible notes and quotes from a mountain of books nearby…]

 _'For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved to judgement;..."_

Unnamed Holy Book, _circa 100 B.C.E., discovered in ruins in southern Creta._

 _"And Ammon cried to the Daemon, 'Lord my God, why have thou forsaken me? A Daemon like none other has driven your people to the land of bloodied sands,' and the Daemon laughed as though the souls of the damned were escaping through its sinful mouth, 'Never forget the slaughter of your People, dear Ammon, for Ishvalla will not hesitate forsake his People again, if the bloodied sands of Ishval are infested with the great sins of the Daemon again,'…"_

Scripture of Ishvalla, _republication 1903._

[In dark ink, sentences detailing alchemical lore and the myths of homunculi cover the page from edge to edge. _]_

 _"Great as though the discovery and creation of such a being would be, no doubt the quenching of this thirst for this forbidden knowledge would bring humanity to its surrender…[and] bring the great, powerful empires of the world to its knees."_

Commentary of the Psychological Aspects of Alchemy, _Michael Von Strauss, 1896._

 _"'Despair, thou art facing the end of your long and prosperous reign, Empire of Byzapein,' and it was so, the rain from the sky as red as blood, the Daemon's wrath descended upon the plains and cities of their fair kingdom…"_

Tales from Archaic History: Second Edition _, Mary Edinburgh, 1799._

 _[Children's fairy story in 'Tales of Archaic History', the Daemon in question is obviously a reference to homunculi. Mechevanese tale, originating in the highlands of the Grejotilk province. May have significance.]_

 _"Great is our land of O'Ruibh!/Hills of emerald/Rivers of silver/A Daemon-Slaying King sitting upon our noble throne/We are rich in the Sanguine Ruby-stone/Flowing as unceasingly through our King's finger's as the ichor of Daemon/An affluent spring of Sanguine Ichor from the veins of Daemon/Undying, Immortal as our Gods…'_

O'Ruibhian Epic Poem, _written circa 1100._

 _[O'Ruibh seems to have an extensive history of interaction with Homunculi. For-.]_

 _"The Inner Devils of the human disposition can come in seven forms, each of their own creation and purpose, each with distinctly separate motives, as concluded by the great philosophers of our era. These are: the Succubus, the Coveter, the Pleonexian, the Narcissist, the Glutton, the Hebetudist, and the Berserker. These all each have a place in almost every Holy Scripture to date- though none of them are without the King- the Great Daemon himself. He also has many names and many forms, but each source of these names agree that the King has a hand in every aspect of humanity's existence- from politics down to the very soul of the individual."_

An Analysation of Human Psychology and Culture, _Gertrude Weber, 1913._

[The words are blocked by the peacefully sleeping face of a teenage boy with short golden hair, the strands fluttering as he breathes deeply.]

 _"Wonderful Glory, O God! Thou art in the highest of Heavens, looking down upon thine holy people, casting away the souls of the Damned to blacken the hearts of the Chosen! Revel, Rapture, Praise, thou hast given the eyes and soul of thine holy people to the Daemon! Praise your Glory, the Chosen shall take this path to become the Daemon..."_

Lekuhan Hymn _, 1821._

[On the other page, the writing resumes its looping scrawl.

 _Definitely a reference to human-based homunculi. Maybe people were 'chosen' as sacrifices or to make human-based homunculi? Lekuhan history may be the most beneficial thing to research at the time being.]_

 _"The true debate of modern alchemical study is the purpose of the Magnum Opus- should it create a Philosopher's Stone, or a Homunculus? That question is left to the descendants of Man to discover far into the future."_

Alchemist's Almanac, _Editorial, Richard Schneider, 1909 edition._

[A slack hand barely wrapped around a pen trails a line off of the end of a word, as if the writer fell asleep mid-sentence.]

 _"The potential for a Homunculus lies deep in the primal depths of Man's soul- if something were to awaken such a thing, nothing could predict the repercussions of a Daemon finally awakening from far in the darkness of a scarred pneuma. Lying in wait like a predator readying to strike and slaughter,the monster we have feared for millennia hides just inside ourselves."_

 _Anonymous, unknown._

[The sentence reads: _Brother's demon wasn't from inside himself. He's been…]_


	2. Pyrrhic Victory

He could hear the sounds of the battle going on far above him, but all of his attention was focused on the seemingly innocent ten-year-old boy in front of him. His small hand was no longer stretched over the gaping crevasse that used to be the right side of his face, now flaking away to reveal shadowy eyes and the darkness inside of his human shell.

Pride's thoughts echoed in his mind as well with his own, he could see Father's underground lair but also nothing but swirling, shrieking souls. Just…a bit farther…

He could feel his throat being screamed raw but he didn't hear it, he could hear it but didn't feel it-

Pride's cranium exploded into shards of alchemical material and smaller flakes of alchemical residue. Ed's fist hovered in the centre of the devastation, rising and falling with the heavy breaths of its owner.

Soon, Pride dissipated into ash, forming a small pile at Ed's feet, with only a brown boy's dress shoe as evidence that the first homunculus ever existed.

When the remains of Pride had settled, Ed allowed a long, relieved breath to escape him. After a moment of letting his abused throat and muscles rest, he brought his fists up to eye level, one worn steel and the other muscled flesh, and opened them.

Empty.

Ed craned his head back to gaze at the blue sky, lighting up red at the edges of the massive hole in the ground, the sounds of alchemical attacks and gunfire cracking and crackling through the air.

As he turned and readied himself to transmute a tower to catapult him into the aboveground battle, Ed didn't notice a faint stirring in the small pile of ashes a few paces behind him.

_000_

Ed's vision blurred and smeared as he saw red. Using his newly restored flesh arm, he ripped the iron pole out of his bicep with vicious force. He flung it out of his sight as if he were disgusted with it, and barely registered the muffled clang as it hit the paved stone ground of the Central HQ courtyard.

Ed threw himself up, snarling. Lightning-quick transmutation instructions flickered through his mind, his mind already planning steps ahead.

GRANITE- SILICA ALUMINA POTASSIUM OXIDE TRANSMUTE

Stone spikes seven feet high rammed themselves into Father's body-

LIMESTONE- CALCIUM CARBONATE DOLOMITE TRANSMUTE

Stone fists pommelled Father's face and torso with unimaginable power-

CLAY- SILICA ALUMINA IRON OXIDE TRANSMUTE

He was finally close enough to unless the full extent of his fury onto Father-

A stone spear was thrown like a super-powered javelin straight through his opponent's skull.

Father stumbled several steps, completely stunned, and Ed saw his chance.

Edward Elric punched God right in the face.

_000_

Usually, he would be complaining about not having a single moment of rest, but this wasn't the time to be pissy.

His little brother was gone, something he had tried to prevent when he attached Al's soul to that damned suit of armor.

Blind panic and logic warred in his thoughts. Two people had already offered stupid ideas for the toll for Al's body and soul. Hawkeye had even thought that Ed was contemplating sacrificing himself- something he was sure he would never do. Loneliness was not something he wanted to subject Al to.

Ling wanted him to use the Philosopher's stone, that bastard wanted Ed to use him instead (Ed was only a little ashamed to admit that he cried a bit over that one). He wasn't going to take their suggestions unless they were good ones, thanks for trying though, ten points for effort, now shut up, I need to think!

It was probably a little cliché, no, extremely cliché, but his morale spiked when he realised something.

He made a promise not to give up. And Edward Elric's promises weren't meant to be broken.

A crazy, but genius idea sprang into fruition in his head, and a slight smile split his face.

One last display for the road.

He grasped an abandoned rod, and began to scratch out a very familiar design.

Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scriiiiitch…

Ed stepped back into the centre of the circle and surveyed his work. Satisfied, he nodded.

"I gotta go," He stated. He clapped his hands together, right between his eyes, and exclaimed, "The Fullmetal Alchemist is going to perform his last transmutation!"

He slammed his hands into the centre of the shaky circle. Blue lightning arced up into the equally blue sky.

He always did have a flair for the theatrical.

_000_

"…!"

A noise?

"A…!"

"Al…!"

His name, being shouted from far away.

"Hey!"

Brother's voice!

"Alphonse!"

For the first time in four long years, Al had eyes to open.

He could feel the hard stone pressing into his back. He could feel the weight of his too-long hair tickling his shoulders. He could smell the iron from blood and ozone from alchemy in the air, he could taste the sticky dryness in his mouth, he could see dozens of pairs of eyes (and one pair of milky grey ones pointed slightly to the right of him) focused on him.

He did it! Brother did it!

And it felt…amazing.

"Oh!" He breathed. Wow, he was breathing. That was weird- and great! He had a heartbeat, too. Even blinking felt new and amazing and Al was sure he wouldn't ever take any of this for granted ever again.  
The next several minutes were filled with hugs and raucous cheering, new sensations (touch! Touch felt like electricity! Warm, amazing electricity!), tears…

This was almost too good to be true!

With all the attention focused on Alphonse, no one noticed a slowly dissolving child's figure creep up on the group, where Ed was in a wide clearing of people.

As Edward bent down to squeeze his brother in a bone-crushing hug, the child rushed forward.

In a matter of seconds, everything fell apart.

Al would never forget the sensation of all of Ed's muscles bunching up and tightening like rusted coils of wire, of all of Ed's joints bending past their breaking points, of the warmth in Ed's body flooding away but also becoming burning hot at the same time.

Ed ripped away from his brother and collapsed to the ground. Pride's heavily damaged, flaking wrist was sunk into Ed's back, the veins standing out like crimson cords under Pride's pallid skin.

Alarmed screams from everyone around Al filled the air. Ed began to convulse violently, twitching and thrashing this way and that.

And then he screamed.

He screamed animalistic sound that shouldn't ever come out of a human's throat. It shrieked and ripped through the air like a rusted knife yanked out of a victim's chest after the slaughter, but this knife screamed on for what seemed like years and years until, unexpectedly, it stopped.

Pride dissolved into the wind.

Ed lay still.

Al shouted with desperate hope, "Brother? Brother!"

Ed didn't respond.

Al attempted to creep forward on skeletal, atrophied limbs to his brother's side, but only succeeded in collapsing onto the ground.

Ed's eyes shot open wide. The gold surfaces were flat and glassy with something Al couldn't identify.

Al could dimly feel a horrible…pressure begin to emanate from Ed's body.

A horribly familiar pressure.

Even in a suit of armour, Al could feel that vile pressure deep in his soul. He knew, then, that it couldn't hurt him, but that pressure activated some ancient primal instinct, one that told man's ancestors when to run, when something was going to kill them.

Fear. Unadulterated, raw fear.

"Broth-"

Ed's flat eyes and expressionless face jerked in Al's direction. With those flat eyes focused directly on him, Al could only feel his sense of foreboding intensify tenfold.

No one was breathing. Silence settled like a blanket over the group, now completely still.

Al didn't notice the jagged shadow in the corner of his eye until it was too late. He was jerked upward by one bony arm, and suddenly, he saw the group of people scattering away from Ed's body, screaming, as everyone grew farther and farther away…

He didn't realise he had been flung until he hit something hard and flat, and several things broke in several different places.

Everything went dark.

_000_

Al woke up in the midst of chaos. He could feel himself bobbing up and down on what seemed like someone's shoulder, but he couldn't be completely sure. His face was pointed at the floor of a hallway- a hallway that was echoing with the din of a clinic after a disease outbreak.

"Agh!" He grunted. The harsh bobbing and jarring of his abused body made several, probably broken, ribs grind together in an undesirably painful way.

Al's breath began to come in short gasps. Oh, god, his ribcage. Every breath felt like a dagger was poking him in the side.

Al's hand's tightened into fists, gathering up handfuls of white linen in the process.

White linen? Al tried to even his breaths to make observations. The weave of the linen was smooth and fine, completely unlike the clothes had last worn when he could wear clothes (he doubted the dingy blanket wrapped around his skeletal body counted as clothing). The cloth more resembled his old dress clothes than what he had originally guessed: white sheets.

His eyes trailed up to a muscled waist, and a swishing, toned upper arm.

"Teacher!" He rasped. It hurt so much to breathe; just how many ribs did he break?

"Alphonse!" He heard her exclaim loudly. She delicately shifted his body into the crook of her arm, so his nose would brush her neck and she could carry him like an infant. "I apologise, I know your ribs are broken, but this hospital is a mess. Don't know how else I would've gotten you in here, those worthless desk clerks."

Al went silent. "Teacher? Where's Brother?" He whispered.

She peered down her strong nose at him. Black eyes met golden-brown for half a second, before she flagged down a haggard-looking nurse.

"I know you're busy, but this boy has at least three broken-" She never got much farther. The nurse interrupted her with a high-pitched scream loud enough to rival a car horn.

"It's a coup fighter! They're going to blow up the hospital!" She dropped her overcrowded clipboard with a clatter, ready to scream a bit more, but Teacher slapped a calloused, bloodied hand over her mouth.

"You stupid…" She closed her eyes and took in a deep, deep breath. "This boy has been starved for a very long time, flung bodily into a courtyard wall, and traumatised. He may be just a bit more important than the man in, say, room one-hundred-eighteen, who has an ingrown toenail, hmm?"

Teacher gave the nurse a look that dared her to argue. The nurse gulped, and glanced over Teacher's shoulder, as if looking for the demons of hell to come running after their angered Queen.

"Right this way, ma'am. But, I've got to warn you that the Dean won't like this-"

"Shut up and do it." Teacher snapped. The nurse blanched and stuttered out a 'yes'.

Bland, crowded hallway after bland, crowded hallway passed Al's slowly dulling eyes. He could feel the edges of unconsciousness begin to creep into his mind. He was unsure that he could stay alert. With every breath, pain caused the corners of his vision to darken, and the darkness would slowly ebb away until the next, struggling breath.

"Hold on, Alphonse." Teacher muttered.

Al finally let go of consciousness when an explosion rocked the earth outside, and sent Teacher stumbling into a wall- Al's side first.

_000_

Al wasn't allowed a single moment of peace. From the moment he woke up days after the ground –shattering explosion (which was revealed to be Mustang and the others fighting the thing), he thought about what he did wrong. The only rest he gleaned from the day's hours was the result of medication, treatment, physical therapy, new rib bindings, and so on, where he was distracted by the huge amounts of pain.  
What could he have done to prevent what happened? Could he have deflected Pride's charge? Could he have warned Brother?

He tried blaming it on the others a few times. All he got from that was guilt. It wasn't their fault, and Al knew it. It wasn't his fault, either.

He had come full circle, hadn't he? Ed had placed blame on himself for losing Al's body, and now, Brother was a thing and Al was blaming himself.

Al never wanted to say that word. Saying that word meant that it was real. It wasn't real. Brother was recuperating in the room next to him, safe and sound and perfectly human, ready to be smacked around by Winry and her best friend the wrench the next time she came. He was just resting a lot. He was probably tired from his fight with Father, and would visit him soon.

Brother wasn't a thing. He had dreamt the whole ordeal. That couldn't be real.

The universe couldn't have punished them yet again. What could they have done to deserve all that?

What could they have possibly done wrong?

_000_

Al had nightmares. But they weren't just normal nightmares, no, they were nightmares that he woke up screaming from. They were nightmares that felt like the horrors within carried over to the real world even after he awoke.

But, in Al's case, this was true.

His brother was turned into a thing.

All because another thing wanted to live a little longer.

The Narcissist had humiliated himself. The Narcissist had hurt his own pride to admit that he wasn't invincible. He had stooped impressively low to steal someone from their brother right after reunion, just because Brother happened to be the most convenient vessel around.

The Narcissist turned his brother into a thing.

That thing gave him nightmares. Night terrors, Teacher called them. She used to have them after her failed human transmutation attempt, she said. Sid couldn't wake her up, but she was screaming and screaming in her sleep-

Shudder.

"Sorry, Alphonse. I don't think this is helping you." She remarked, momentarily soft. "But don't think I'm going to let up on you! Don't think I haven't noticed you slacking in physical therapy! Do you want me to help you with it?"

Alphonse stammered out a 'no ma'am' and 'I'll work as hard as I can ma'am', and let out a relieved sigh after she nodded sternly.

This was feigned normalcy. It was a pathetic attempt at filling the hole in their worlds- the hole that Brother had occupied and that thing had ripped open.

_000_

A month passed in the hospital before Al could take a single step on his own. He was extremely exhausted afterwards, but the nurses' congratulations lightened his mood, if only a shade.

Nothing, really, could remove the shadow over everything Al did- Brother was out there, somewhere, living as a thing.

Al, throughout his hospital stay, realised several things: One, Brother was a killing machine. Two, Brother could be completely lost to him. That thing could have completely absorbed his soul. Three, Winry Rockbell had no idea. Her cash cow, her childhood friend, was possibly dead and she couldn't ever know. Not yet, anyway.

Four, Brother was immortal. He could live for hundreds of years longer than any human ever could. He had amazing powers, a detachment from morals, the ability to slaughter entire cities, and thousands of souls living inside of him. He could outlive everyone he knew. His body would survive for millennia as a sixteen-year-old boy.

The closest Al ever came to smiling in that hospital was when he imagined Brother having the same 'average teenager problems' well into his eighties.

Five, Al was going to be fifteen in only a few short days. The 7th of June- it was marked in fat red marker on a paper calendar at the nurses' station: ALPHONSE'S BIRTHDAY, ROOM 203. FIFTEEN YEARS OLD. He had completely forgotten about it until one of the nurses made an offhand comment about family coming to celebrate with him.

The shell of numbness and detachment had shattered then, and for the first time since Al had regained his body, he knew what it felt like to cry.

_000_

It was the same dream he'd had every night for the past few weeks.

He was sitting in a dark room, in an uncomfortable straight-backed chair. His hands and feet were tied by thin black cords to the chair, and the ends trailed off into the darkness of the room's edges.  
Then, a harsh light flickered on above him. He squinted up a bit, but inevitably looked down to the space in front of him, which had been occupied while he was distracted.

Brother sat on the floor, face expressionless and eyes closed. His hair was back in its usual braid, his outfit spotless, and his red coat without a single tear or ragged edge. The black tank top he always wore underneath it wasn't torn or bloodied in any way, not like Al had last seen it.

And that's when his eyes opened.

He would look up at Al with sharp, deeply shadowed eyes, eyes that were empty far beneath their gold surface. A twisting deep inside Al's gut told him something was definitely wrong.

That twisting turned into cold terror when Brother's pupils shrank to razor-thin slits. A too-wide grin split his familiar face, and his voice rang out, sounding like multiple voices at once (a woman screaming the words far away, a child with a hollow soul, an old man croaking out his last words before death, a chorus of ghostly androgynous voices singing the words to a poignant tune), "Oh, but you two succeeded, didn't you? Isn't that what you wanted?"

The shoulder of his coat slipped away, revealing a red tattoo surrounded by residual automail bolts and scarring, as Brother lunged for Al's throat.

Al awoke with a start. For several moments he sat completely still, pressing a sweating hand to his heart, beating out a panicked rhythm.

Mei's breathing exercises. Breathe in. Exhale. Breathe in. Exhale.

He closed his eyes once more to get his heart and lungs under control. After he was sure he wasn't going to have a heart attack, Al surveyed his surroundings.

It was still in the dead of night. Soft silver moonlight sent the planes and furniture into hazy, gentle shadows. Teacher was asleep, her head inclined at a seemingly uncomfortable angle on the couch next to his bed's nightstand. A fat hardcover book lay abandoned on the floor, her slack hand hovering just inches above it.

Mei's head was resting on Teacher's thighs, her hair still crimped into tight waves after being restrained in her characteristic braids all day. Said hair had one of Teacher's calloused, tan hands resting on top of the strands.

Teacher had both of her shoes off and tucked under the bench, while Mei had completely abandoned all over-clothes she had, and was wearing the simple pink dress she normally wore during the day. A few strands of short hair in the front of her head fluttered and fell every time she breathed in her peaceful sleep.

They looked almost blasphemously tranquil, sleeping there, the complete opposite of the turmoil in Al's mind.

He was content with watching the two rest for a while. Neither of them had let him see them resting very often, and it was rare to see them without an afflicted (or angry) look on their face.

Al slowly propped himself up on his elbows. There really wasn't any point in trying to sleep after having that dream. He hadn't ever succeeded in the past.

Al sat up and bent his legs at the knees to sit cross-legged. He clasped his bony hands in his lap, and resigned himself to stare out the window for hours on end. That is, until he heard rustling from a dark corner. Al made a small noise of alarm, and began to attempt to claw himself out of bed (which, of course, he failed at doing).

"Alphonse?" A high voice yawned. Al halted his panicked scrambling, and turned towards the source.

Mei was bracing herself against Teacher's shoulder, covering her huge yawn with a slightly pudgy hand. "Wha-what time is it?"

Al shrugged. "I don't know." He turned his head away from Mei's questioning, sleepy eyes.

"Did you have another nightmare?" The question was completely innocent, concerned even, but the reminder of his dream made every muscle in his body stiffen.

Al felt himself nod tightly.

He heard a rustling, a few light steps, and felt the side of the bed sag as Mei sat on the edge.

"You don't need to feel bad, you know." Mei whispered. "It was scary." Al's face softened at her simple word choice. He'd never been able to sum up every feeling he had in that moment. He couldn't express in words the horror and desolation he felt when the gold of his brother's eyes went flat as a coin, but somehow, this girl who was barely thirteen was able to do it using only the tone of her voice.

"And-and your brother's gone because of that thing." Mei's voice cracked somewhere in the middle of her sentence.

He was quiet for a minute. "Mei?" She made a small noise of acknowledgement through her hands, which were pressed into her face as some sort of barrier.

"I'm going to find him. And I'm going to get him back."

The last words of his sentence were said with such certainty that Mei glanced up from her hands to meet Al's eyes.

They were burning with a determination and certainty that almost scared her a little.

His furrowed eyebrows and flat set of his mouth told her two very important things.

One, Alphonse reminded her very much of his brother, albeit in a less evil-boy-who-lied-to-me kind of way.

Two, he was going to accomplish his goal.

Alphonse Elric would reclaim his brother from the homunculus Pride, come hell or high water.

_000_

That was interesting to write. I hope you enjoy the upcoming angst- have fun suffering, dear readers. Щ(･｀ω'･Щ)

(Ha, I gave Al one of my friend's birthdays. He always seemed like a summer baby to me.)


	3. Bittersweet

Strapping on all of his braces, crutches, and making sure his bindings were in just the right position just to walk to the bathroom was a tedious chore. He grew to hate every strap and every buckle and even the sound of his crutches hitting the tile floor.

Though he inwardly complained of the discomfort the devices gave him, he relished in his newfound independence. He only had two weeks left until he only used the crutches and the leg braces were long gone.

Two weeks was still a long time.

He had only frowned a little bit when Mei told him to put them on, so that was something, at least.

The nurses had gotten used to seeing the odd pair of a Xingese princess and the Fullmetal Alchemist's brother tottering down the hallway at odd times in the day. A few nurses even waved good-naturedly as they passed.

Mei ushered him into an abandoned hospital room, with the beds pushed up against the far wall, leaving the floor bare and empty.

The room looked quite inhospitable and uninhabited.

When Alphonse had settled comfortably onto one of the abandoned bed frames, Mei dumped several pieces of chalk out of her shoulder bag.

"While you've been doing physical therapy, I've been reading up on some things," She said, pulling out a yellowed slip of paper from her pocket and studying it. "Alkahestry things."

She had piqued his interest. He limped to Mei's spot on the floor, and slowly settled himself beside her.

She brought the paper over just a tad to allow him to see what was written on it.

A complicated alkahestry circle was drawn in scrawling lines across the paper, in thick black ink. All around the inner edge were indecipherable symbols, Xingese words, and alkahestry runes that Alphonse couldn't begin to decipher.

He shook his head and smiled inwardly. "I don't know how you even begin to understand this, Mei."

"Well, I don't understand alchemy that well, so I think we're even." She joked. Grasping a cylinder of white chalk in her fingers, she began to scratch out the lower edge of the outer circle.

"So, what are you doing this for?" Al asked, genuinely curious.

A slight twinge of worry toned her next words. "The nurses say you developed something called 'osteoporosis' because you didn't eat much while you were away. It makes your bones brittle and you can break them a lot easier."

She shifted to the left to continue the circular arc. Al furrowed his eyebrows and grabbed a cylinder of chalk in his fist.

He'd heard of osteoporosis. That was something Granny Pinako had. He was under the impression that it was something that only old women developed because of their age, but apparently not eating did that too.

"But…what is this for?"

Mei tapped the chalk against the floor. "I'm going to try to cure you. Alkahestry can do some amazing things! See, the rune for 'strengthen' will go right- there." She pointed to a spot adjacent from where Al had settled himself down.

"I can't read Amestrian, so Ms. Curtis helped me research this circle. She was really helpful! She helped me when I was confused, because alchemy and alkahestry are so similar. She's a really nice lady- when she's not mad." Mei and Al shuddered in unison.

"Agreed." Al affirmed.

The long, smooth strokes of Mei's chalk turned into short, sharp scratches as Mei wrote alkahestry runes and several Xingese characters. Mei began to translate as she wrote.

"'Strength return to their body, rejuvenate the soul, lighten the burden…'" She muttered.

A moon, surrounded by two circles, marked the halfway point of the circle. As Mei drew closer and closer to her starting point, characters tracing the lines all the way, Al's sense of bewilderment grew.

"Have you ever done anything this big before? It's got to tire you to actually cure someone of a chronic ailment," Al said. "If it's going to take too much out of you, I don't think you should do it." Mei looked up at him, pausing in writing the character for 'brittle'.

"Alphonse," Mei smiled. "Am I not your friend?"

Al was taken aback. "Well, yes, of course-"

"Don't friends want to do things for their friends? Don't friends care for each other?"

He didn't answer.

"When you told me you were going to get your brother back," several sharp scratches became a rune resembling a flower, "You convinced me. You were so determined- and I'm ready to help you get him back. Alkahestry will help me do that."

A thin hand laid itself on top of Mei's short, pudgy one, stopping her from connecting the ends of the circle.

She looked up to see Al smiling softly at her, his eyes filled with warmth.

"Thank you."

Mei's face brightened as she nodded. "Hm!"

The chalk finally met the other end of the circle. Faintly, Al could feel some sort of energy begin to leak out of the circle. It was somewhat reminiscent of the pressure that thing exuded, but somehow more of a benevolent version.

Mei nodded towards the centre.

Clacking and creaking of metal crutches hitting the floor and leather braces straining against Al's movement accompanied Al's slow steps to the centre.

"Ready?"

Al hesitated. Did he really want Mei to try doing something she'd never done before, just for him? It would be difficult to traverse the country and find a way to get his brother back if he broke a bone every time he slipped.

Mei seemed determined to get him to do this. She wanted him to accomplish his goal just as much as he did.

Their nods were simultaneous.

Al didn't know when Mei activated the circle, but all he could remember, when he thought about it later, was the feeling of warm hands weighing down his limbs and tingling electricity racing up and down his body.

_000_

It was early August when Nurse Gertrude had nodded in approval at the number that was on the scale.

"Well, look, Al! You're still a bit on the thin side for 170 centimetres, but based on your improvement rate, I think you'll be out of here in a week or two!" She chirped. Her words had made his day just a bit better.

He suspected Nurse Gertrude's words were correct. He only had to use his crutches after a lot of walking (namely, chasing after Mei after she stole his left boot and hid it somewhere), and he had noticed his ribs weren't visible anymore. Physical therapy had caused him to gain a healthy amount of muscle for a fifteen-year-old boy.

On the seventh of August, Al woke up to see discharge forms, a very familiar suitcase, and an old photograph on the foot of his bed.

_000_

The train station was loud and crowded. The high ceilings and marble floors echoed its noise thousand-fold, but Al didn't notice the volume. He was focused on the two Xingese women in front of him.

"You're welcome to visit Dublith any time you like," Teacher said. "But remember that I'll check to see if you're still competent in my teachings!" She cracked her knuckles for emphasis.

Al thrust his unoccupied hand in front of him. "Yes,yes, I'll remember!" The memory of his last visit to Dublith was still fresh in his mind. He couldn't feel pain or even get bruises then, but he was sure that he definitely would the next time Teacher threw him bodily across the street.

Mei burst into loud tears and flung her arms around him. "Be careful!" She cried. He was reminded, painfully, of the last time she had hugged him like this.

He hugged her tightly. After a moment, he pulled her arms off of him, and bent down so their eyes were at the same level. "Don't worry. I will. You be careful too, okay?"

Mei nodded tearfully, and embraced him one more time before stepping back. Teacher rested a wide, calloused hand on the top of his head (which, he now noticed, was a couple centimetres above her own) and gave him a light smile.

"It'll be dangerous. Remember to send me a letter every so often, okay? Don't…" She paused, her smile not quite meeting her eyes anymore. "Don't make me worry about whether you're alive or not."

He could hear the unsaid statement in the air: _Don't be like your brother._

Al stood, quiet, for a moment. "How's one a month sound?"

Teacher smirked. "Good enough."

Mei tugged on his coat lapel. Tears were still tracing wet tracks down her face, but now she didn't look so desperate. "Don't forget about me."

"I won't."

The train whistle punctured the air. Wheels hissed as the train began to pick up speed and depart from the platform.

"Oh!" He exclaimed. Alphonse waved one more time at the two, and sprinted off towards the train's door. His hand wrapped around the cold metal of the rod bolted to the side of the door, and his booted feet found unsteady purchase on the steps leading to the inside of the train car, just in time to dodge a man walking a bit too close to the side of the train.

He turned around just in time to see Teacher waving, her figure quickly shrinking into the distance, and Mei running along the side of the car until she couldn't keep up anymore.

He hung out of the niche watching the two, waving with the hand (that was still holding his brother's old suitcase) that wasn't keeping him from falling to his certain death.

His last image of Mei before he retreated into the train car was of her standing on the train platform, hand high in the air, looking oddly constricted in an Amestrian-style skirt and blouse, tears running down her face.

_000_

Alphonse fell asleep on the hard wooden bench, with the rattling of train tracks lulling him and the green hills of the countryside flashing past his eyes.

He didn't think it was fair that the only dreams he had since he was able to dream had only been nightmares.

This time, it wasn't the recurring nightmare that had plagued his dreams for months. A new nightmare had sprouted from his subconscious.

He was standing in an empty train car at night. It was moving much faster than he was used to, so fast that he couldn't distinguish what was flashing past the window.

Three darkly shadowed silhouettes stood in front of him, with their backs turned. One was an adult female, one was a shorter male, and the third was a young child.

The adult female spoke in a low, contralto voice. "Alphonse."

The child exclaimed in a high voice. "Big Brother!"

The male, in the middle, refrained from speaking until the other two had finished. He turned his head, his face still in deep shadow, the colour of his eyes shining out like a searchlight in the dark.

A splash of gold in the black.

A scratchy tenor voice came from the male. "Al."

The screech of metal against metal. From the female's chest exploded something dark and viscous.

The screech of a child in pain. The child hunched over, and lumbered away on all fours like a wolf-child, becoming hairier with each step.

Nothing happened to the male in the middle for several seconds, until his muscles and tendons seemed to ripple and twist.

His body convulsed in a warped and unnatural way.

He fell to his knees, shuddering, both arms grasping each other as if the figure was trying to hug himself, so tight that Alphonse could almost hear bones crack.

His arms went limp, the fingers brushing the ground.

He wrenched his head back to look at Alphonse, the splash of gold in his eyes now a deep plum.

White teeth shone out in the dark in a wolfish grin.

Alphonse gasped, his eyes flying open. He gave himself a few seconds to gather his wits and stop trembling like a leaf in a rainstorm.

"Uggghhh." His groan was long and drawn out. Falling asleep with his eyes aimed right towards the window was not a good idea, now he reflected on it. The sun was now high in the sky, bright rays shining directly into Alphonse's equally golden eyes.

After rubbing his eyes with one of his hands, his eyes met another pair of big green ones.

He blinked a few times. A child was staring over the back of the seat in front of him, staring directly at Al with eyes widened in curiosity.

Al smiled and waved. Emerging from the seat, a small hand waved right back.

"Where's your mommy and daddy?" The child asked, the rest of their face rising up into Al's view. A smattering of freckles brushed across the child's cheeks, stretching from ear to ear and bridging a round button nose. Shorn brown hair brushed the tops of the child's ears, which stuck out from the sides of his head.

"I'm riding the train alone." Al indulged him. "Where are you going?"

The child smiled widely and stabbed a chubby thumb at his chest. "I'm going to visit my grandma with my mommy in Bellenau. It's Grandma's birthday- she's turning sixty and I'm turning six!"

"Oh, happy birthday." Al grinned. This child reminded him of someone, but he just couldn't place who.

The child's grin widened further."What's your name, mister?" The child tilted his head to the side.

"My name's Alphonse. What's yours?"

"My name's William! My mommy likes to call me Will. We both think Willy is a silly nickname."

"I agree. Willy's pretty silly."

The door to the car from the dining car rolled open.

"Will, why are you bothering that boy?" A female voice, obviously his mother, called from the doorway. Will moved over to reveal a woman with long chestnut hair, holding a paper bag that probably had a pastry from the dining car in its contents.

"Oh, he's not bothering me. It's okay."

She flapped her hand at Will. "Well, that doesn't mean he gets to get away with not sitting down. Go ahead! Sit! Sit" She chided.

The woman mouthed an apology before settling back down into her seat.

Alphonse made himself comfortable, or as comfortable as one could be on a wooden bench, and resigned himself to staring at the window until the train arrived in the Elgach City station.

_000_

When Al emerged in the warm August air, he closed his eyes and let the heat of the sun warm his eyelids.

He wasn't sure he'd see the sun for the next few hours, during which he was going to be holed up in a cold, musty library, surrounded by a wall of boring alchemical texts. The Elgach City Mythos Library was famed all around the East Area for their extensive collection of alchemical lore and research second only to the Central Military Library in Central City, which was only accessed by State Alchemists and military officers.

If he was going to find a way to reclaim his brother, an alchemical mythology library was a good place to start. To most people, homunculi were little more than legends from ancient civilisations, with little more real substance than air.

Researching was going to be long and hard. Long stretches of just reading on subjects that may not even help him accomplish his goal was going to take up most of his day- and may stretch on into multiple days. Al would have to find lodgings somewhere.

Scouting the train station, he spotted a bulletin board next to the tickets booth, crowned by a big wooden sign marked with black letters that read, "INFORMATION AND OPPORTUNITIES". The bulletin boards' surface was littered with scraps of paper, faded signs, and several missing pets posters. An odd newspaper or boldly lettered Bed and Breakfast advertisement broke up the white carpet of paper every so often.

Among these nondescript signs, a single piece of paper stuck out. It was a long, handwritten sign advertising temporary lodgings in someone's home for 'passing tourists, over the age of fifteen, party of one'. The address listed was at 566 Aspen Street, which based on a very faded map next to it, was only a short walk from the train station.

The creator of the sign (who wrote their name at the bottom in illegible, loopy cursive), didn't seem like an untrustworthy person or even someone who would make him feel too uncomfortable while he stayed there. One thing made the deal for Alphonse: the owner promised a full breakfast each day at the renter's request, but only if the owner was home.

He nodded to himself. Yes, this room would do.

Al sure hoped that the creator of the sign didn't mind their roomer's lights staying on well past midnight and into the wee hours of the morning.


	4. Stalking Shadows

Winry's eyes slid open. At first, because it was so dark, she thought that maybe they were still closed.

She waved a hand in front her face.

Nothing.

She groaned, but the sound was swallowed by the blanketing silence.

Usually Granny would be up at this (probably) unholy hour, making breakfast.

Winry couldn't hear any pans banging together, or even Granny humming before she began breakfast.

The quiet was suffocating to her ears.

She wrestled the quilt off of her, clearing her throat a number of times just to hear something.

She opened the door with little more than a squeak, though she exhaled in relief to hear the quiet ticking of the grandfather clock down the hall, and see soft moonlight filtering through the hall window. Her footsteps towards the clock were oddly muffled.

The mirrored surface of the clock lay just underneath a glass shield, protecting the black numbers and iron hands from the elements and Winry's forever curious hand.

Her very first mechanical project was the inner workings of this clock. The complicated, interlocking gears and cogs had fascinated her five-year-old self for hours on end, figuring out what went where and what to screw in which hole. The clock had been the first thing to get her interested in mechanics, though Granny's nagging could have been a part of it.

Winry's smile shone white out of the grey of her face in the darkness. She could take it apart again, but Granny would probably be a bit more than miffed if she found her inspecting a clock rather than her work.

Speaking of Granny, where was she? The clock showed it was five-oh-five A.M., and Granny woke up at five most days. It didn't take her long to get dressed- a quick wash and an old shift dress and apron was usually good enough for her.

Breakfast, however. Breakfast was a complicated affair that took at least forty-five minutes. Breakfast was Granny's pride and joy. You work a lot, you eat a lot. Breakfast was the most important part of the day. It gave you energy for working on automail non-stop, and hard work was the second-most important virtue of Rockbell women. The first was something Winry had to exercise every day with someone who just didn't understand that you can't walk on an automail leg only weeks after surgery, you'll get nerve damage, it's not a good idea to do that, sir.

Which was what made her lateness (even five minutes counted as late with Pinako 'Insufferably Punctual' Rockbell) so unusual.

Winry stood up and stretched her back, cracking it in no less than eight places.

Might want to go check on Granny. She could have fallen while dressing. She was getting into her late seventies; it wasn't a total impossibility.

Granny's door was unlocked, as always. Winry wasn't met with the image of Granny sprawled out on the floor, but Granny curled up under her quilt, sleeping peacefully.

Winry smiled. She must have forgotten to set her alarm clock the day before. She worked on a single arm for a single customer from lunchtime, through dinner, and up until she retired at eight-forty-five.

A quick inspection of the clock confirmed Winry's suspicions. The winding key wasn't turned at all, and the hands of the clock stayed as still as the air in Winry's room.

Winry smacked the side of her fist into the palm of her hand. She would make breakfast for Granny! She hadn't cooked in quite a while, and it would save Granny some extra work to do.

Heading down into the kitchen, Winry didn't notice that the grandfather clock had stopped ticking.

_000_

Winry woke up on the sofa, bright light streaming directly into her eyes.

She grunted and flung her arm over her eyes, waiting until the general discomfort had passed until she peeked out at her surroundings.

She seemed to have passed out on the sofa after breakfast, covered in pancake flour and droplets of butter and milk…which the couch currently had all over.

Winry cursed colourfully. Just another thing to clean up!

Her pyjamas were absolutely filthy with flour, forcing her to retreat upstairs for a shower and change.

After her shower, as she traipsed down the stairs, Winry spotted a curling piece of paper on the counter.

Marred by two lines of Granny's angular handwriting, it read: _Thank you for breakfast, I appreciated it. I'm heading into the next town over for some supplies. Did you know we're out of size one bolts? I'll be back after dinnertime. Don't wait up on me. ~Granny_

Winry smiled and shook her head. At least she appreciated the breakfast she slaved over for half an hour- and nearly ruined the sofa with.

Winry was about to lock herself in her workshop for the next several hours, when she heard Den barking like someone was coming up the walk. She glanced out the window to see Den baring all of his teeth, his ears laid flat against the back of his head.

This wasn't a salutatory bark. This was a protective bark.

She paled slightly in alarm. There were only two types of people Den barked at like that: people with other male dogs (which was nearly impossible, because all of the dog owners here had female dogs), or actual threats.

Winry instinctively curled her fingers around her favourite weapon- a three-kilogram, Halloran Inc., pure A-grade steel adjustable wrench.

Her knuckles turned white as she peered around the corner into the foyer, watching the crest of the hill through the front window with widened eyes.

Her grip went slack as she heard a familiar voice say, "C'mon, you big mutt, why're you growling at me like that? You know me."

The wrench clattered to the floor. Winry took several hesitant steps out to the front door, but as her hand met the cool metal of the doorknob, she lost all hesitancy.

Winry yanked the door open and sprinted out to the front yard, feeling happy tears well up in her eyes.

The crashing of Al's huge, hollow footsteps was missing, and that could only mean one thing.

Ed's golden-haired head crested the hill, just as Winry came sprinting at him.

He looked up just in time to get a face-full of blonde hair and muscled arms wrapped around his neck in an ecstatic embrace.

Winry didn't see his lip curl in disgust, but only felt his arms, this time both flesh, wrapping around her body.

It took all the willpower Winry had to not cry tears of happiness at that moment.

She gave him one last, strong squeeze, before she pulled back, arms still braced on his chest.

"You did it," She breathed, not quite believing it herself. "You finally did it." She laughed, and laid her head back onto his chest.

Ed's smile snapped off his face the moment she wasn't looking at it. He could feel that stupid brat trying to take control of his movements, shrieking in his mind about this disgusting girl, about how 'don't hurt her, she's done nothing to you'.

Ed chuckled wryly at his high-pitched imitation of that brat's voice. He always was the best at mocking his enemies. Drove them right up the fucking wall.

Winry tilted her head back to gaze at him with shining blue eyes. "Where's Alphonse? Is he all right?"

Ed smiled at her. "Yeah, he'd just been in the gate so long that his health deteriorated a little bit. He'll be back to the Alphonse we know and love in no time."

Winry grinned and punched him in the chest. "Well? Do you want breakfast or have you already eaten?"

"No, I haven't, actually. I was planning on eating here," Ed said.

"Oh, so you were sure I would pity you and feed you out of the goodness of my heart?" Winry teased. This felt much better than waiting until she got news from him; it was always broken automail, though every time the phone rang she was sure it was going to be the military coming a-knocking, contacting the next of kin to inform them of something terrible. It had been thoroughly evidenced by Ed's decimated automail that he had come within a hair's breadth of her getting that one fateful call.

Ed rolled his eyes and trailed after her into the house, the door shutting on them with quiet finality.

_000_

Winry didn't think it was wise to remark on it, but Ed smelled very different. It wasn't an unpleasant smell, or a wonderful smell, but it definitely didn't smell like Ed.

It was thick and heavy and reminded her of old velvet curtains, with just the slightest twinge of motor oil from his automail.

A brown trench coat, a white button-up shirt, and long slacks were an odd choice for the burning July heat. Ed always wore a bunch of layers and didn't seem bothered by the suffocating heat, but this outfit choice was just a little too normal for him. Flashy colours, clashing patterns, lots of black. That was 'well-dressed' for Edward Elric.

His eyes looked a little different, too.

The colour was oddly flat, kind of like a coin, while his pupils stayed at a static size.

She wasn't going to remark on that, either. Ed was probably very tired from the train ride and whatever the hell he had to do to get back to her safely. Though, something else she had noticed over the course of the past few years probably had something to do with it.

Winry pretended to not see the way he flinched when there were unexpected loud noises, or his face blanch and tighten like elastic pulled to its limit when she grabbed him a little too hard out of nowhere.

Certain things would set him off. He didn't go into full-out panic mode, but when he heard the butcher's assistant's knife whistle through the air, or he heard children scream while they were playing, she could visibly see every muscle in his body tense up and his eyes widen just an infinitesimal amount, the pupils of which shrinking into tiny dots.

They didn't talk about that.

Though, there was something she wanted to talk about.

While readying the bacon, she had dropped the metal pan onto the tile floor.

She had instinctively glanced over to Ed, where he sat, at ease. His eyes were still trained onto the window, the loud noise obviously not affecting him.

That was just a little bit weird, and definitely out of character. He liked to pretend that he wasn't affected by things like that, he was the famed Fullmetal Alchemist after all, but you can't cover up signs of fear using willpower alone.

No one could fake the ease Ed was exuding that masterfully.

"Make sure you eat all of the bacon," Winry said over her shoulder. "Granny'll be ticked if she thinks I wasted it on you. Besides, bacon has protein. At least it'll finally make you taller."

Winry smirked acerbically, expecting a long tirade about 'I'm not short' and 'at least I'm taller than you, pipsqueak' and 'I'm only sixteen, I'm still growing, you evil woman', but none came.

Winry raised her eyebrows as she stacked toast and bacon onto the plate.

Ed was simply looking at her.

She sighed and slapped the plate in front of him. "Just eat, idiot."

Okay, now this was getting weird.

One month away couldn't have changed him this much. A decade away couldn't change Ed's height complex.

Just what had he gone through in that month after he left her for Central?

It took her a few moments to notice that Ed wasn't eating. Whatever was taking him so long to dig in, he better fix it, because she wasn't wasting good food on his useless ass.

When she looked up to chastise him, he was staring right at her, smiling.

But, it didn't seem like a smile. His eyes were narrowed and cold.

"Ed, what's wrong?" Winry asked.

His mouth cracked open to show the slightest glimmer of teeth.

For some reason, this made all of the hair on the back of Winry's neck stand on end.

The sun drew behind a cloud outside, sending the kitchen into grey shadows.

"Oh, nothing, Winry." He said, but he continued staring at her.

His chair screeched backwards as he stood up and grabbed her by the wrist with his right hand. She could almost feel bruises beginning to form on her wrist as she was yanked up on her feet.

"What the hell is wrong with you, Ed?" She shouted indignantly, though her voice wavered as Ed's smile flattened immediately.

His eyes were cold and unfeeling as he tilted his head, and continued in a condescending tone, "You always were too trusting, weren't you, Winry Rockbell? Quite dense, or maybe you just denied things."

Winry felt ice race down her spine. His voice sounded off, oh god, what was wrong with him?

Blind panic submerged her as she heard his next words, said in what seemed like three different voices at once, "That would always lead to your inevitable doom, you know? He tried to protect you, but he failed considerably."

This was not Edward Elric.

Was she dreaming? Was she having a nightmare?

She began to claw at his fingers, tightening around her wrist.

You couldn't feel pain in dreams, could you?

Winry's fingers groped at the table behind her. Desperate fingers clamped around a fork, which she then flung at the impostor's eye socket.

Something dark and sharp deflected it, but the impostor didn't seem to move.

However, that unexpected attack caused his grip to slacken somewhat, and Winry ripped her hand out of his fist.

Adrenaline powered her legs past their normal speeds as she sprinted towards the front door, heartbeat pounding in her ears.

Winry stopped abruptly. A thin, black, razor-sharp object was pressed up against her throat, and already a few crimson threads were trickling down her throat and into the collar of her shirt.

She slowly allowed herself to look back at the entrance to the kitchen, where Ed's impostor was emerging, followed by what looked like all of the shadows in the room, trailing after him and radiating around him.

His eyes weren't flat, they were cheap imitations. He didn't smell like Ed because he wasn't Ed.

And he didn't seem to be human.

Winry felt herself being smothered by the icy depths of a lake called Dread.

The impostor approached her, an animalistic, predatory grin widening on his face, his irises darkening to an evil shade of plum.

There was only one word Winry could describe what she was feeling as he came closer: pressure.

Pressure, like just before lightning struck, seemed to be emanating from the impostor's body, sending Winry's already panicked mind into overdrive. Her eyes frantically searched the foyer hallway, looking for an exit, an opening, anything!

"Oh, Winry Rockbell," The thing said, coming only a foot away from her, its pupils thinning and lengthening into slits. "He'll miss you, won't he? I can hear him screaming about your safety, little blonde brat."

She hadn't screamed before then, but the next words the impostor said, in Ed's voice, wrenched a terrified shriek from her throat.

"Bye, Win."

_000_

When the sun was turning the sky red as it sank below the horizon, casting long shadows along the roads of Resembool, a hobbling, short figure entered the Rockbell house.

An average-sized figure left it, minutes later, all of the long shadows seemingly reaching out to touch it as it walked.

_000_

*dramatic shrug and harmonica*

let's play spot the symbolism

(Just want to let you know that this fic has a playlist now! It's at: /beavha/a-study-in-homunculus

happy listening! Each track corresponds with a chapter.)


	5. The Narcissist Reborn

Hours upon hours of poring over ancient alchemical texts with bindings and vocabulary older than the wrinkled librarian at the front desk yielded nothing.

The only thing Alphonse received was several papercuts, a bruised head from the untimely fall of a very heavy volume, and frustration. All mentions of Homunculi in the books of the Mythos Library were limited. The only real information about anything similar were references to the human psyche's 'demons'.

Gertrude Weber had unknowingly delved into the realm of the Homunculi's names and Father, but her revelations were more in the context of humanity's weaknesses: envy, greed, lust (or bloodlust), sloth, wrath, gluttony, and pride. She was a reliable source if Alphonse was interested in the psychology of each sin, but he wasn't.

Unfortunately.

Alphonse had given up for the day and was leaving the library, until he tripped on a loose floorboard and landed flat on his face.

"Ouch-" His exclamation to no one in particular stopped short.

In the recesses of the space under the floorboard, a small glint of gold shone.

Alphonse attempted to pry up the board from a few different angles, but his fingers and arms still refused to do the job, weakness still occupying his muscles.

One borrowed chair leg and a lot of effort later, Alphonse had the guilty floorboard sitting beside him. At the removal of its roof, the hole coughed up a massive cloud of dust and lint. Al sneezed copiously, earning a miffed 'Shhh!' from a patron cooped up somewhere else in the library.

Down in a shallow pit under the floor, at least ten books, cloaked with a mottled grey carpet of dust, sat vigil. Golden letters crawled across each spine, spelling out the titles in old-fashioned lexicons.

As Alphonse leafed through the yellowed pages, he realised something.

The Elgach City library had something to hide. All of the books Al had unearthed were all about one subject: Homunculi.

These weren't psychology's 'demons'. These books were about physical homunculi.

A crumbling manuscript written in 1803, talking about the O'Ruibhan's ancient stories of demons with sanguine ichor, an archaically-worded tome detailing a religion centred on what was obviously a human-based homunculus, a collection of tales from cultures around the world about homunculi…

The books were everything Alphonse had hoped to find. Why they were hidden underneath a floorboard, Alphonse didn't know. All he did know was that he felt like some kind of private eye, kind of like in those games he and Brother used to play when they were children.

The reminder of Brother made Alphonse's eyes cease their feverish reading of the pages. A wistful smile crinkled the corners of his eyes as Al was once more lost in memories.

They had tried to solve the great mystery of 'where is Miss Gallagher's tabby cat' for an entire week. Winry, who wasn't even involved in the whole investigation, had stumbled across Mittens hidden behind a bush near the schoolhouse, her belly swollen with the promise of kittens.

Al had begged, pleaded, and used his dessert for the next week as a bargaining chip, but he still didn't get a kitten out of the whole experience.

Approaching footsteps snapped Al out of his nostalgic reverie. He snapped the books shut, settled the floorboard precariously back into its original spot, and tried to look nonchalant as he covered the spines of the books with his coatsleeve.

He flipped to a used page in his notebook and grasped a pen, just as the wrinkled crone of a librarian peeked around the shelf and peered at him with the eyes of a hawk.

Al tried to appear nonchalant as her eyes continued boring holes into his back and into the surrounding floor.

She sniffed dryly and retreated into the shadows.

Once Al was completely sure the librarian had sunk back into her cave, his attention turned back to the hidden books under his sleeve.

They were obviously hidden under a floorboard for some reason, and that reason would most definitely keep him from taking these books home in the common way.

Though Al didn't like it, he'd have to steal them. The only thing keeping all of his morals from collapsing was Al's mental assurance to himself that he would return them the first chance he got.

Al knew the books shoved deep down in the confines of his satchel weren't visible, but that didn't stop the slight flare of panic from rising up in his chest as the librarian fixed her watery brown eyes on him as he passed.

His anxiety didn't fade until he was nearly home.

_000_

The sun had already sunk far below the now black-cloaked horizon when Al became aware that he was starving. His stomach complained loudly of its emptiness.

He went to go search for the landlady's (she was more of a landgirl, to be precise) brother, who was the more culinary of the two. The land(girl?) had joked that she would burn water if she attempted to cook for Alphonse, her brother would at least make something that appeared edible.

"Miss Sarah?" Al peeked his head from behind a corner into the kitchen, his eyes raking the room for a trace of the land(girl). In an alcove just out of his sight, a warm light glowed, obviously from one of the kerosene lamps that Miss Sarah hoarded. Her little townhouse on Aspen Street was one of the few that hadn't been installed with new electric lights in the past twenty years. Miss Sarah, with being unable to work due to her age and her brother at a low-paying job, just couldn't afford to purchase any. Her old-fashioned kerosene lamps seemed to suit them perfectly well, and Alphonse didn't question it.

Miss Sarah's light brunette head leaned out of the breakfast table alcove, a teacup raised to her lips. A soft rustling of a book being set down and legs being brought down from their perch on the table came from the alcove, just as she asked, "Hmmm? What's wrong?"

"If it's not too much trouble, could Mister Joseph make some dinner? If it's too late, I understand, I'll just go pick up something from the general store-"

Miss Sarah cut him off with an airy chuckle as she stood up. Her full, unimpressive height was much lower than the average stature of a fifteen-year-old girl. In fact, she was even shorter than Brother was at that age, by a few centimetres.

"Al, it's fine if you want something to eat. All Joseph's doing is being lazy. He needs something to do." She smiled. Her next words were shouted at the ceiling. "'Ey! Joseph! Come on down here and be productive!"

A muffled reply came from the ceiling.

A few moments later, heavily-booted footsteps clumped down the stairs behind Alphonse.

"How you doing, Alphie?" A man's deep voice greeted. Al turned around to greet a very tall man, who was quite the polar opposite of his sister. While Miss Sarah was short and nearly a dark blond, Mister Joseph was an extremely tall man who had to duck under doorframes, and had short, straight dark hair instead of wavy brown tresses.

Joseph clattered around the kitchen with what seemed to be haphazardness, while his sister teased him light-heartedly every step of the way. Al contented himself with sitting down at the rough-hewn wooden table and listening to their interactions.

The siblings bantered back and forth for most of the time it took for Joseph to finish making whatever he had selected to cook. During the comfortable silences, Miss Sarah hummed a rich tune Al had heard her listening to on the radio that morning. The singer had been a crooning Aruegan woman with a twanging Northern Aruegan accent, and from what Alphonse could gather from his short-lived Aruegan studies, she was singing about some sort of lost love. He heard Miss Sarah attempt to sing with the vocalist and give up after the singer spewed a litany of rapid-paced Aruegan words.

Al's view of the table was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a white bowl filled with thick broth and meat.

"Eat up," Joseph's wide smile, crowned by his black moustache, lit up his warm face. "Stew. One of my favourites."

"Stew?..."

 _"Stew! It's the best invention ever! It's got milk, and it still tastes good! How do they do it?" A boy with golden hair exclaimed, his hands thrown out to balance himself as he carefully plodded down the stone barricade._

 _Next to him, on the ground, a boy with slightly darker hair sighed, a smile still on his face. "Milk isn't that bad, Brother."_

 _"Oh really? Prove it! I'm older, so I'm right!" The boy on the wall cried indignantly, his arms still out like a bird's wings._

 _"Brother, you know that's not fair!" The second boy shouted, his hands planted on both hips._

 _The first boy threw his head back and giggled. "Why don't you try and catch me?" He jumped down set off running down the dirt path as quickly as his short legs could take him._

 _"Brother-!"_

 _The warm summer air was filled with the shouts and laughter of the two boys, running up the crest of the hill to a slope-roofed white house, the windows dark save for one. The faint silhouette of a woman could be seen leaning on the window-sill, waiting for the two boys to return._

The bowl and its contents blurred and smeared as tears began to well up in Al's eyes. Before he knew it, Al was sobbing into a bowl of stew.

"Sarah, he's crying!"

"What? What did you do?"

"Put the bowl in front of him!"

"Maybe your cooking's just that bad."

"'Ey! I just said 'stew' and he burst into tears!"

"Maybe he doesn't like stew."

"Shuddup! We're being rude."

His breath was coming in short gasps when Mister Joseph's concerned face filled his vision.

"Alphie, what's wrong?"

Al shook his head and buried it in his hands.

This was so embarrassing! He burst into to tears in from of people who were basically strangers, and now he was making them worry. What kind of guest was he?

"I'm f-fine," Al choked out. He rubbed violently at his eyes to scrub away whatever tears had begun to escape. Gulping several times, Al tried to set his face back into an expression he hoped looked neutral.

"No, you're not," Miss Sarah retorted, her round face coming into view next to Mister Joseph's no-longer-blurry one, though she didn't have to crouch to be at Al's eye level.

"So," Mister Joseph said, standing up. "What is it?"

"You don't have to tell us _all_ of it," Miss Sarah sent Mister Joseph a pointed look.

"We'll _pester_ you until you tell us all of it." Mister Joseph countered, more towards his sister than Al.

Miss Sarah stuck out her tongue, earning something as close to a laugh as Al could manage.

"Besides," Mister Joseph turned back to the stewpot. "It's really none of our business. But, if you need anything, just tell us, okay?"

"It'll probably be a little awkward to ask an almost complete stranger for a hug, Joseph."

"Hush! I'm being a mature adult!"

A weak laugh escaped Alphonse before he could help it.

"No, no, thank you. This is enough." He smiled weakly down at the spoonful of broth now in his hands. His reflection rippled in the brown broth, his eyes still a little red, serving as a vague reminder of his memory. "I just have a lot of memories with stew."

"Oh," Miss Sarah breathed. A quick glance at her face showed that she understood, even without Alphonse explicitly stating it.

He took a sip of the broth. His eyes widened as a thick, salty flavour burst in his mouth. This could be on par with Granny Pinako's stew.

"Wow," was all Al could manage.

"Psst, Joseph, I think he likes it," He heard Miss Sarah stage-whisper, as he slurped down the entirety of the bowl in one go.

_000_

Late into the night, when even the drunkards had left the tavern and returned to the ire of their spouses, a man walked down the street. He looked completely average, but was somehow intimidating to the odd stray cat, who puffed up as soon as he neared and hissed a violent oath.

He hummed something tuneless and without emotion under his breath as he observed the starry night sky. His eyes were cold and drawn, his smile without warmth.

His eyes were a rather peculiar shade of dark violet, though that wasn't the most off-putting thing about him.

Around the man, the shadows of the night roiled and radiated to the rhythm of the tune without a tune, swirling around him as if he were a demon of the dark.

No light fell upon his skin, once tanned, now sallow.

"Quite a pretty place, I think," His voice punctuated the dark. A few rats, an alley away, scattered like paper thrown to the wind.

Stone buildings rose high above him, their brick facades unforgiving and flat.

"It's got a decent population," He said. "There's plenty."

Suddenly, his eyes narrowed at the entrance of an alleyway a few paces forwards. A shadow snapped out at the dark alleyway, then a yelp, a few grunts, and a sickeningly wet crunch.

His face went back to an expression resembling cold pleasantry, the shadow retracting back to his side.

"I think it'll do, don't you?" He said to what seemed like no one in particular.

He continued humming his tuneless melody, while far above him, a black-clothed figure crouched on the lip of the roof.

Their sharp eyes, framed by the porcelain planes of a Xingese mask, focused on his back, slowly passing underneath them like a golden ant.

A long, sharp knife pierced the air next to man, who barely flinched. He crouched and flicked at the dagger, which sent a loud 'twang' through the air.

He smirked up at the figure with coldly amused eyes.

"You can't sneak up on me."

The neighbours, later that day, complained of hearing loud noises and banging. They said it sounded like 'two drunken marksmen were having a duel'.

Old Lady Francesca at the elderly home woke up shouting some nonsense about the entirety of Crotogusca being shoved into one massive stone. She was quickly quieted by one of the nurses, and no one else was bothered by Old Lady Francesca's wild prophecy. She had quite the reputation for crazy future-telling. One of her earlier 'premonitions' was about a boy being turned into an empty shell of metal. No one took that one very seriously.

Dogs were barking all day, unceasingly. They wouldn't quiet for anything, much to the anger of their owners and surrounding neighbours.

The sky was cloudless and blue. Nothing in the air hinted at any deviation from a routine day in the south-western border town. Crotogusca was peaceful until the sun set as red as a drop of bright blood.

Shadows raced through the streets and connected with their other branches, quickly forming a complicated design surrounded by yet another circle, lined with shadowy runes all the way.

When the last droplet of sun sank below the horizon, crimson lightning arced into the jet-black sky.

_000_

Alphonse sat straight up in bed, heart pounding and skin covered in sweat.

He had the feeling that something very, very bad had just began.

If anything he had done from the past five years counted as evidence, he should heed his gut. People who didn't obey that little voice in the back of their head didn't last very long, anyway.


	6. Victorious

A figure clothed thickly in black sprinted down majestic hallways. Lined with tall red columns soaring into the high mahogany ceilings, the palace was truly fit for an Emperor. Even in the corridors, the affluence of the Emperor was displayed at every possible spot, from the solid-gold embellishments gilded onto nearly every surface, to the jade mosaics covering huge stretches of the walls.

The figure didn't stop to admire the magnificent architecture as they sprinted to a huge set of doors. Fancy handles, at least as long as a man's arm, ran up the inner length of the doors, embossed with Xingese characters.

They threw the heavy doors open with little effort, and upon entering the room, bowed deeply.

The great room was a breathtaking sight. Huge ceilings covered with gold-painted words stretched over the massive expanse of the room. Scarlet columns decorated in jade and gold supported the massive ceilings. Richly dark wood, worn from centuries of footsteps, creaked under the weight of the bowing figure. The floor was surprisingly empty, save for a runner rug and the true centrepiece of the room.

A tall dais, with several steps leading up to an impressive throne, was against the farthest wall. Roofed with tall arches gilded in gold, the throne was easily the beauty of the room. Upon the throne sat a boy of at least seventeen, dressed in clothes that hinted his authority was far above an average boy his age. His imperial robe, deeply coloured in scarlet, violet, and gold, was thick and gave him the appearance of having much more mass than he actually did.

The figure, still bowing so deeply the back of their head could be seen, knelt down in full koutou*, and said the traditional formal Xingese greeting, the kind used to someone in a much higher rank; namely, the Emperor himself.

"Your Imperial Majesty, I come to the foot of your great throne with grievous news," The figure said, rising when the Emperor nodded for them to stand. Their voice was feminine and young-sounding, and their (supposedly) matching face was hidden from view behind a sombre porcelain mask.

The girl's face was still tipped downwards, but her eyes soon snapped up when strange snorting noises came from the Emperor's throne.

Looking completely the opposite of his noble first impression earlier, the Emperor was hunched over, completely puce in the face from a laugh he was struggling to hold in.

The girl's wide black eyes gave off an extremely affronted look.

"If I might ask Your Imperial Majesty-" She began dutifully, bowing slightly.

"You-" A spew of uncontrollable cackles split up his sentence. "You, koutouing at my feet like-" He reared his head back, his angular eyes screwed up and threatening to stream tears of laughter across his face.

Several seconds passed before the teenaged Emperor reclaimed control of himself, but this advance sacrificed the impressive dignity of his previous way of sitting. He was flung across his chair, wiping tears from his eyes where the leaders of the most powerful dynasties had commanded legions of soldiers and ruled over the great Xing Empire, and now where the Emperor took naps and ate his greasy lunch.

"May I remind our Radiant Highness that he is the Emperor of a great empire, and should act as such?" Annoyance was beginning to hinder her judgement, and it was showing.

The Emperor blew out a long, happy "pheewwww," and sighed. "Sorry, Lan Fan. Go on. Grievous news?"

Lan Fan silently thanked whatever universal force was at work for the Emperor's speedy recovery from his laughing episode and approached the throne, where the Emperor was still casually lounging across.

"Fuyong** Bai Li has not yet contacted us with more information on the Monster," She said, flipping her hood back to reveal black hair, twisted into a neat knot at the back of her head. "She traced the Monster's aura to a town called Crotogusca, and has not called on the telephone since. It has been over a week."

"Is that so," The Emperor said absently, his eyebrows knit together.

He was quiet for several moments. "Amestris. It's still being terrorized by that Monster? Couldn't we have helped the two boys more?"

"There is not much we could have done. The Monster had taken him already, comparable to the way the Greed beast had overtaken our Imperial Highness." Though Lan Fan's answer sounded pragmatic and logical, the tiniest note of bitterness tinged her words. "A country of subjects mustn't be neglected, even for men we owe a great debt to."

"He wasn't a beast, Lan Fan," The Great Emperor muttered, the adult he had been forced to become showing in the grief in his eyes and the worry lines that creased the space between his brows. "He was a friend."

The two sat in silence, Lan Fan considering his words, and the Great Emperor debating whether or not to ask his vassal the question gnawing at his mind. "The Monster, what do you think he is capable of doing to Fuyong Bai Li?"

Lan Fan hesitated. She had seen the demon's shadow powers, just after she had returned from having the metal arm installed in place of her missing flesh one. The thing exuded a sort of vile pressure that scared even Lan Fan, usually so cool and collected. Grandfather had noted as such a bit later that the thing's pressure was something darker, more malevolent than the other Monsters. She could still sometimes hear the slithering of shadows in the dark, razor-teeth ready to tear her to shreds if she walked down a dark hallway for too long. She always kept a lamp and a kunai next to her bed after the incident with the devil-boy.

"Though I regret having to tell your Imperial Highness this, I cannot deny that whatever horrors Fuyong Bai Li will endure at the hands of that devil, she will not survive with anything short of divine intervention."

The Great Emperor took in a deep breath. His eyes, once they finally opened to gaze at Lan Fan, were hollow with a tiredness Lan Fan had seen on only four people in her sixteen years of life.

"A demon has yet again killed a vassal of mine," He said. "And revenge vowed by an Emperor must surely be delivered upon."

_000_

Nightmares plagued Alphonse's sleep that night.

They weren't as scary as his previous dreams, but they left him with a feeling of unease he couldn't shake. As he sat in bed, staring at a wall, he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck prickling as they stood on end. He felt invisible eyes on his back, watching from the shadows.

Shadow eyes.

Something rustled somewhere by his feet.

A chill shuddered down his spine.

He ripped the quilt off his legs and scrambled to light the lamp, his heart pounding out of his chest.

When the flame finally caught and cast his cosy room in a flickering orange glow, Al flung the lamp around to light the dark corners of his room. As he suspected, he was alone. Al let out a small breath of relief.

He had completely abandoned the notion of going back to sleep by now. The great silver disk of the moon was just beginning to sink down from its highest position, lighting his room almost as brightly as the flaring kerosene lamp now on his nightstand.

Al sighed, all of his frustration and fear and exhaustion wrapped up in that one, long noise. The universe must've wanted one last laugh by this to them. It was quite ironic. The creatures he and his brother had worked so hard to defeat had, in turn, defeated them instead. Now, his brother was his mortal enemy.

No, that wasn't fair. Brother was being held hostage by their enemy, and not by choice.

Which made it even more important that Al find a way to turn his brother back into a full human being.

Before Al knew it, he was fully dressed and sitting on the edge of his bed at an ungodly hour of the morning. His suitcase was packed with his meagre belongings, accounted for by the fact he had no need for clothes until only four months ago.

A few shirts, some trousers, extra underpants, and he was wearing his only pair of shoes. The boots' brown leather was scuffed and the laces frayed, being a hand-me –down from a night shift nurse's son, but they were already broken in and served their function well.

The only other non-clothing objects in his suitcase were a few cenz, his brother's old pocketwatch, some notebooks, and a chipped wooden frame that had multiple pictures jammed underneath each other. The foremost picture was of him and his brother, around four or five, with their mother. Their mother's face was slightly blurred because she was throwing her head back as she laughed. Though it definitely wasn't the clearest picture of her that Al had saved from his home's fire, it was his favourite. Her face was rosy and her smile genuinely gleeful, and the entire photograph had an air of contentment and simple happiness.

This picture was probably taken before his mother had bought one of those new cameras that had the ability to lessen the blur effect of movement, which would have sacrificed some of the pure happiness in the photo. To Al, it seemed that the blurriness of her face added a dreamlike quality to the photo as she laughed at the antics of the two boys in the foreground.

Behind that photo, there was a picture of Winry, Al, and Brother playing in the rain. Based on the length of Winry's hair and the infamous shirt Brother wore almost constantly at that age, they were freshly eight years old, with Al nearing his seventh birthday.

They were all barefoot. Al remembered that the mud they tracked in the house later was enough to coat the entirety of the foyer's floor. Winry had her arms flung towards the grey sky, smiling widely up at the raindrops, her eyes screwed up to avoid said rain flying into them. Her legs, all the way up to her knees and probably farther, were speckled with droplets of mud from the road. Her sundress revealed anything, this was most likely a summer rain.

Brother's leg was kicking up into the air, a thin spray of water trailing up behind his foot. His arms were trying to counterbalance the momentum of his kick, but based on his angle in the picture, his denim-clothed backside was going to be a brown denim-clothed backside in half a second. His grin was carefree and joyous, and although his mother had probably died only a few short years ago, the only expression on his face was playfulness.

Al's back was to whoever had taken the picture, so he couldn't discern his facial expression, but if he could guess, it would match the other two children's.

The next pictures in his stack weren't quite so innocent.

It was late morning, based on the bright light shining through the window. On a white windowsill, with the paint chipped in some places, sat a pitcher probably more suited for holding water, not flowers. They were yellow and white, matching the porcelain pitcher's off-white.

Brother sat on a bed with rumpled white sheets, gazing out at the rolling green hills and snaking brown ribbon of a road outside the window. The stumps of his right shoulder and left leg were wrapped in bandages, two white calloused hands tugging the bandages on the latter limb tight. Al's leather gauntlet's fingertips were barely visible at the corner of the picture, reaching into frame just enough to be seen.

Brother wasn't paying attention to either pairs of hands. His gazing eyes held no alertness, but instead looked absently at the tree line. They were deep and shadowed, though the rest of his face was entirely blank.

He looked hopeless.

Al smiled gently down at the next picture.

This was a portrait taken of the Fullmetal Alchemist and his brother for military records. Brother had objected strongly to having his picture taken, which was exactly like him, and so had a disdainful scowl on his face. His arms were crossed and his chin tipped proudly high, which only served to emphasise the height disparity between him and the massive suit of armour behind him, which was so tall its head stretched out of frame.

Al remembered that they had taken two sets of portraits like this. One was of Ed and Al when Brother had first joined, accompanied by a single-person photo of Brother to put in his file. They had taken another when Brother looked noticeably different than he did at 12 years old, at fifteen. Al had chuckled behind Brother's back at the fact that he didn't seem to have grown very much between photos. Based on his growth in the next year after the photograph was taken, Brother grew fifteen extra centimetres just to prove him wrong.

The next was a formal portrait of Winry and Aunt Pinako in their best dresses. Winry was standing at her grandmother's side, her hair pulled up into an elaborate twist, while Aunt Pinako's dress was buttoned up to her throat. Unlike most formal portraits, Winry and Aunt Pinako had matching smiles, and Aunt Pinako poorly hid her unlit pipe under the folds of her skirts.

Al's penultimate photo had only one subject: Brother. Right in front of a dark train, Brother grinned back at the camera with a suitcase slung over one shoulder. His posture was careless and casual, with one white-gloved hand in his pocket and both eyebrows raised. His hair flowed loosely from his ponytail, tightly anchored to his scalp by a thin strip of leather. He was noticeably taller and his face thinner and more masculine, though his eyes still held the same brightness as they did when he was twelve.

When they had all the photos in Al's new camera developed later, Brother had been a tad irritated and had grumbled for the next hour and a half. At first, Al thought it was because he had taken more pictures of Brother (it wasn't like he had any other subject, really) than anything else. He didn't figure it out until he caught a few words of Brother's grumbling. Brother, apparently, thought he looked 'stupid' and it 'wasn't even a flattering photograph, goddammit Al'.

The last photo- wait, where was the last photo?

Al rifled through his pile of photos. The last photo in his frame was nowhere to be found. Al peered over the edge of his bed to the floor, which was completely absent of everything except for his open suitcase.

With a few more inches over his bed's edge and a precarious tilt, Al peered into the suitcase's depths.

Underneath a dingy white sock, the grey corner of a photo poked out. Al plucked it out with quick fingers and laid it next to the others.

His very last photo was of himself.

It was hard to tell it was him, with the lighting in the photo.

Al was silhouetted against a bright window. The brightness had faded the view outside into purely white light, and with the photographer's angle behind Al, a distance away, Al was little more than a shadow.

Al sat on his hospital bed with his hands in his lap. He could tell his hair was long and his body was still skeletal by the sharp outlines of his elbows. His face was turned to the bright window, so it was unlikely that he knew he was being photographed.

Al didn't like this photograph very much, but he didn't have the heart to throw it away. He had never figured out exactly who had taken it; it had just showed up on the table next to his bed with no explanation. Teacher had shrugged when he had asked about it, and Mei gave him a confused look. He doubted she even knew how to operate a camera.

Al gently shuffled all of the photographs in their original order back into the confines of the wooden frame. He settled it back into its little hollow and latched the suitcase closed.

Click, the lamp was turned off. Rustle, tap, tap, he rose off the bed and walked a few steps.

He stared at his reflection in the mirror across the room, and laughed a little to himself. How ridiculous he looked, being ready to go out in the wee hours of the morning.

He crossed the room and rested his hand on the scratched bronze knob, casting one last glance around the room before opening the door and stepping into the pitch blackness of the hallway.

He'd leave a note and his last few cenz on the table. Miss Sarah and her brother were nice, but he couldn't stay here. Winry was waiting.

_000_

The boy's hand swirled the amber liquid in the bottom of the tumbler around a few times, then tipped the cup to empty the last dregs into his mouth.

"Haven't had that in a long time," The boy muttered to himself, sliding his tongue over his lips.

The lone moustachioed barhand gave him a sidelong glance, and determining that hassling this boy was a good cure for his boredom, clomped over with heavy footsteps.

The two men sized each other up for a few moments before either said anything. The barhand leaned against the counter and narrowed his eyes at the boy.

"Aren't you a bit young for that stuff, kid?" He asked gruffly.

The boy coldly glared at him. "I assure you that I'm much older than I look," he growled.

"You sure about that? I mean, you ain't bigger than a minute-"

The boy's arm seemed to suddenly take a life of its own and snatched the man's stained collar, yanking him up to the boy's face. His barstool clattered to the floor.

Several tense moments passed.

The boy's eyes were bright and fiery for an instant, but the brightness slowly faded back into dull gold until his hand went slack. He dropped the barhand right back onto the counter and settled into a neighbouring barstool.

"Sorry," He grumbled. "Though I advise you not to make unwise comments like that in the future."

The barhand was speechless. He barely stammered out, "Th-that's a peculiar eye colour you have there."

The boy's eyes glittered malevolently as a thin smile crossed his face. "Thank you, I know. Gold's a rare colour to have, isn't it? But wouldn't purple be a tad more interesting?"

"I…I guess."

For a single second, the barhand could have sworn that the boy's eyes darkened to purple.

The boy interrupted the barhand's thunderstruck silence. "Thanks for the whiskey, sir. Have a nice evening."

As he left the tavern, the boy waved over his shoulder at the open-mouthed barhand. The door shut behind him, leaving him alone in the darkening purple glow of dusk.

_000_

That little brat. That stupid little display in the bar could have raised a few suspicions, and all Pride needed was a few enquiries and he'd be locked up in a state prison. Though escaping wouldn't be a problem, needless casualties would definitely heighten the urgency of the search for him.

The little brat had become better and better at resisting as time went on. He had slipped through Pride's little net while he was distracted by the liquor and the strange lustre of the barhand's bald head. Drunkenness probably had a part in his little slip.

He couldn't complain about all of it, though. It had given him the chance to show off, and true to his name, Pride did like to show off.

The little brat was quite pathetic, really. Pride could hear him kicking himself at not being able to escape his net to save that stupid human girl from her fate. He had spent a few weeks being pissy about it, though after an incident with a train Pride didn't hear him being as loud as he had been about it.

 _You idiot_ , a voice suddenly said, somewhere around the inside of his left ear.

Pride's steps faltered a bit.

 _You complete idiot._ The voice continued snidely. _My body is only sixteen. I haven't developed an alcohol tolerance yet. You know what that means?_

Pride grimaced to himself. The little brat's voice had never been so clear before. Maybe the alcohol was taking its toll already.

 _I'll have fun being in charge, bastard._

Note to self, Pride mused. Alcohol=bad.

_000_

Three hours later, Pride was leaning on a sofa in a shoddy hotel room with a hell of a drunken stupor. He couldn't see straight, walk straight, or think straight.

So much for celebration.

Suddenly, everything clicked off.

_000_

He could see.

He could move his own arms.

Ed blinked several times just to make sure he wasn't being tricked by his own desperate mind.

He was finally in control.

Ed threw himself to his feet and cheered. He tossed his coat onto the sofa and collapsed back onto his perch, humming like a proud cat.

It seemed alcohol impaired Pride's ability to keep him at bay. Getting him drunk more often was now a necessity on Ed's to-do list.

For some reason, Pride seemed to be suffering all the mental handicaps of being absolutely plastered with no negative effects on Ed. This was a welcome change, being able to think clearly for the first time in a long time.

Ed calculated that he had at least several hours before Pride came back to his senses. What the hell could he do with all that time? Anything to prevent? Things to destroy to make Pride miserable?

Ed's grin slowly faded.

If only he had gotten Pride drunk before he transmuted Crotogusca. If only he had gotten Pride drunk before he visited Winry. There was so much he could have done if he was better at opening Pride's 'net'.

Ed stared at his shoes and massaged the sides of his nose. There was no use in thinking about what he could have done. There was no way he could fix that now. Somehow, he'd have to figure out Pride's plans and do something, anything to keep them from succeeding.

Ed looked out the window at the slowly rising moon. That would require acting. Acting wasn't his forte.

The door creaked open on rusted hinges.

They were home.

_000_

Somewhere on the far side of West City, the barhand sat straight up in bed. His eyes were widened with a sudden realisation.

"That kid at the bar."

A silence.

"He didn't pay his bill."

The barhand laid back down in bed and went back to sleep. His wife snored on.

_000_

Geez, that was a long wait! I'm sorry; I hope the word count makes up for it (almost 4000 words!). I had final exams this week, oops.

*Koutou- "Kowtow, which is borrowed from kau tau in Cantonese (koutou in Mandarin Chinese), is the act of deep respect shown by prostration, that is, kneeling and bowing so low as to have one's head touching the ground. " (Definitely not Wikipedia copied and pasted I swear)

**Fuyong- Mandarin Chinese for 'vassal'.

*** I think the reason why Al doesn't have a lot of pictures of himself is because he isn't exactly the kind of person to keep lots of pictures of himself. Plus, he was a suit of amour for quite a bit of his life. Photos are for capturing memories and showing change in people throughout the years. How do you document changes in a suit of armour? "Year #3. New dent in left pauldron."?

The last part was most definitely a reference to the Emperor's New Groove. You know, the scene with Kronk. No figuring out things though. (Poor barhand. Dealing with Pride is scary, drunk or not.)

Alright, I hope that chapter was a fun read! The photographs may or may not be important to the story later, but I still apologise for the bit of info-dump.

Summer break is starting soon, so get ready for an influx of chapters!

Until then!


	7. Arrogance

In the hours just before dawn, the city was silent. Al's booted footsteps were the only sound to echo across the quiet streets, and Al found it a bit unsettling. It was just too quiet. Admittedly, it was god-knows o'clock in the morning, but night had always been a strange time for Alphonse. When he was stuck in an armour body, at night, he was completely alone. It gave him time to think about things he shouldn't have thought about. Now, night was pure shadow, and shadow was something he would rather stay away from.

Al settled himself on a cold bench and goggled up at the light-dappled night sky. Now, there's something he never tired of. The night sky and its endless expanse of constellations, along with the seemingly infinite navy stretch of space, awed him more so than many things ever did.

The hours passed by without event. The sky lightened, and the light greyed as dawn approached. As soon as the first ray of rosy sun peeked over the horizon, Al heard doors slamming, and a quiet conversation on the doorstep of some hole-in-the-wall restaurant took place between a lively chef and his sleepy adult daughter. The city was waking up.

When half the sun had cast its light along the earth, across the street, a woman in heavy, colourful skirts twirled out the door. She was followed by a duo of dark-haired men, on carrying a drum, and the other a stringed instrument. She said a few words to them in a melodic language Al couldn't place, and the taller man with the stringed instrument played a short, lively tune. The woman matched the first note of the tune, and man carried on with his plucking.

They stopped after a bit, and the woman made a few comments. The men nodded, and started up with a bouncy, jaunty melody with plenty of drumbeats.

The woman twirled and hummed a note to herself. Then, she began to sing.

If Al could find a word to describe her voice, it would be 'velvety'. Her voice was smooth and rich, and even though Alphonse couldn't understand a word she was saying, he knew that this woman had a talent.

He sat for at least half an hour, just listening to the street performers practice their routine for the day. It was a welcome break from poring over alchemical texts. Alphonse let the music wash over him until the sun had completed its ascent from the horizon.

The sky was a weak blue when Al finally heaved himself up from the bench and away from the performers. As he wandered aimlessly throughout the streets, he watched as businesses opened their doors in hope to tempt in an early-morning breeze, as children laughed and ran through streets while playing a game only they could make sense of, and as laundry was hung outside windows.

Just as he drifted under a fluttering white sheet on a line, Al opened his wallet, and realised that he was completely broke. Every cenz he had was spent on lodgings in Miss Sarah's house.

The pleasant smile on his face froze.

"Ah."

Train tickets cost money. Money that Al didn't have.

" _Ah_." His small exhale came more forcefully this time. The smile slid off his face as he crouched to the ground, staring down into the dark depths of his undeniably empty wallet.

He sat there for a few moments, contemplating what items in his possession he could sell without being too detrimental to his already shoddy situation, when his thoughts strayed back to the street performers. An idea struck him with all the force and speed of a lightning bolt.

Al gave a third "Ah!", this time much more enthusiastic than its predecessors, and set off into a café.

"Ma'am!" Al called, leaning over the counter to catch the attention of the café owner. A woman with a broad, mahogany-brown face and a round halo of black curls peeked her head out of a doorframe just beyond Al's view. She made a noise of acknowledgement, her focus still focused on the clearly heavy crate in her hands.

"Sorry," the woman said, dusting her hands off, after she placed the crate somewhere out of the way. She busied herself with something behind the pastry counter. "What was it that you needed?"

"Do you have a sandwich board of some kind that I could borrow?" Al asked.

"Well, yes, but what do you- no. I'm not going to ask. Just bring it back in one piece, alright?" She settled a battered sandwich board onto the countertop, waving her hand to dismiss him.

"Yes, ma'am! Thank you!" Al called, hefting the sign into his arms and out the door.

Several minutes later, Al was sitting outside the coffee shop with a sandwich board beside him, declaring "OBJECT REPAIRS- 20 CENZ".

Though it was slow-going at first, the line of people waiting for Al to alchemically repair their broken vases, watches, and chairs grew until it stretched down the pavement and around the corner. Customers from this line were streaming into the café next door, and the owner seemed very happy about this new development, if the glowing looks she sent in Al's direction showed anything.

After Al fixed the clasp on an old tarnished locket, and a few bills were dropped into the open suitcase at his side, Al appraised the amount inside. Judging by the stacks of ten-cenz notes and assorted coins, he had barely enough to catch the nine-thirty A.M. train from Elgach City to Resembool.

His stomach chose that moment to growl loudly and inform him that he had a few more expenses unaccounted for.

When he attempted to order breakfast in the café, however, the owner waved him off and insisted she give him a discount for all the traffic he had brought. Al was extremely grateful for this, and made sure she knew.

At exactly nine-thirty, Al was sprinting across Platform 3, running after a train set for Resembool.

_000_

Earlier that morning, in the dead of night, somewhere in Elsto, Edward Elric sat on a sofa in a shoddy hotel room.

All of his muscles were tensed at the ready. He was ready to jump into action at any moment, he was ready to attack that thing-

But he couldn't, he realised. His body loosened at the joints, and all of the tension flowed out of him. He couldn't. He couldn't let that thing know he was here.

"Why so tense?" A voice crooned, from the kitchenette.

Ed refused to look at it. He instead threw his coat over his shoulders and pushed past it to the door.

"I'm going out."

He slammed the door behind him.

Ed spent the next several hours wandering around Elsto's abandoned city streets, no destination in mind.

Around dawn, he found himself at the riverbank, scratching useless transmutation circles into the wet earth. It was an old habit, doodling transmutation circles. He couldn't use them anymore, but old habits die hard.

Al always used to go to the riverbank when he and Ed fought.*Ed would usually find him, hours later, surrounded by little transmutation circles and their results: a clay cat, a dirt toy train, a bird made from mud.

Ed smiled a little to himself. What was he trying to accomplish here? Nothing. For the first time in a long while, he had nothing to do. He couldn't very well leave that thing. It would get suspicious if he just up and left.

No matter what he did or tried, Pride was still stronger than him. When he was fully sober again, Ed fully expected to be submerged in the tide of souls deep down inside of him. There wasn't much he could do when he wasn't in control of his own body, just struggling to hold on to his individual identity.

Try to find Al, Pride would kill him. Try to seek help, Pride would kill the help. There just wasn't a way out here!

Ed slammed his fist into the dirt, spraying droplets all over the side of his pants.

"Dammit." He swore, wiping at the fabric.

He could practically hear Al's voice now.

" _Brother, I know you can't find me. It'll be alright. We'll find a way out of this, okay?"_

"Yeah, I know," Ed muttered. "I just feel so useless. I'm the older brother. I should be out there, trying to find a way to-"

Ed scoffed at what had nearly slid off of his tongue. He had very nearly said 'a way to get our bodies back'. What a creature of habit, he was. That bold statement had no meaning now.

Clenching his fists, Ed scowled deeply. Al was probably out there right now, scared out of his mind for what had happened to his brother, and it was all his fault. He should have made sure he finished off Pride, saved Al from all of this fear-

 _Oh, finish me off?_ A cold, derisive voice said.

"Damn right, finish you off." Ed growled. "You'll pay for separating me and Al. I swear on my own soul I'll find a way to get you out of my body."

 _Your_ _body_ , _is it? No, I don't think it is. I believe it's ours._

"Ours, like hell. It's mine, and you're an intruder. You hurt my brother, straight out of the Gate, and now he has no idea where in the hell and what in the hell his brother's doing. This entire catastrophe is your damn fault. I'll get you out, no matter what it takes. For Al."

 _Oh, and you'll protect him from me like you did with that Rockbell girl?_

Ed flung himself to his feet, but this time, there was no one to throw a punch at. "Don't you _dare_ threaten-"

 _Goodie, looks like the little brat's temper is flaring up again. Watch it. One slip and you'll go right back where you came from._

"I could say the same to you," Ed snarled. "One slip and I'll send you back to Hell where you belong."

 _It's mutual then._ Pride chuckled coldly. _How about, the first one of us to defeat the other, gets the body?_

"You just signed your own death warrant."

 _Same for you, boy._

Ed stared out at the river, a feral grin splitting his face. "I don't think so. You'll be saying good-bye soon, Pride."

Pride didn't answer.

"And I'll make sure you suffer tenfold what you've done to us."

He set off back to the streets, the newly rising sun lighting Elsto into colourful dawn shades.

He had yet another goal.

Like hell Pride would win.

Like hell.

"You hear that, Truth?" He shouted at the sky. "You're not going to screw us over again!"

No reply.

_000_

As the paved roads of the Elgach City outskirts turned into pothole-ridden roads, and those into dirt roads, the landscape grew into rolling green hills and mountain foothills. Trees began to thicken and grow taller, and the intervals between lone houses grew longer and longer.

When Al noticed that he hadn't seen another farmhouse for at least thirty minutes, he knew that Resembool was growing closer.

Sure enough, not ten minutes later, he could see the Resembool train station inching into view in the distance.

The late August air was just as warm and muggy as he remembered, but now it was tinged with the coolness of Autumn, just beginning to creep in with promises of scarlet leaves and steely blue skies. Autumn in Resembool was a beautiful time, and Al had always appreciated the visual beauties of it when he had visited in a suit of armour, but if he stayed here for very long he'd feel the other changes too. Instead of just seeing the leaves change from a rich emerald green to fiery reds and oranges, he'd feel the air become crisper, and smell the faint, earthy smell of Autumn.

He climbed the hills lined with dirt roads, offering pleasant greetings along the way to everyone he passed. Only a few recognised him, and the ones who did remarked on his odd choice of dress his last few visits. Al chuckled nervously in response and evaded these questions.

Though Al had a late breakfast, he was already hungry for whatever Winry and Aunt Pinako could whip up for lunch. One of his greatest wishes was to eat their cooking, and it would finally come true.

He felt a bit guilty for being able to enjoy this. His brother was somewhere, all alone, under control by the homunculus Pride.

No, no! He wasn't going to settle back into that type of thinking again. Being happy once in a while wasn't going to kill him. His brother of all people wouldn't want him to be sad at his expense. Besides, Al was doing all he could at the moment to save his brother from Pride, and that would be enough for Brother.

Al's steps faltered. Brother. Winry didn't know about Brother.

The memories came rushing back. Memories of flat gold eyes and an endlessly cruel smile filled his vision until he was blind with remorse and grief and guilt-

 _Snap out of it!_

He was standing right in the middle of the road, staring into space, his face as white as snow and his hands shaking. Al shook his head a few times to clear it, and began walking again. It was best to solve that problem when the time came. Now, Winry was waiting. He mustn't keep her much longer.

As Alphonse crested the hill, a familiar slanted green roof rose into view. A yellow house and familiar wooden porch followed soon after. He could just see the marks on three of the posts where he, Brother, and Winry carved their names into it one summer. Their pudgy hands were red and raw from the rubbing of the carving tools they had used, but nonetheless, looking at the names later, they felt proud of what they had accomplished.

Al's face lit up with a soft smile. He might not have his brother, but at least he had his childhood friend.

How she would smile when she saw he had his body back!

"Winry! Aunt Pinako!" He called, racing up the path. His grin couldn't get any wider.

_000_

*Working some FMA 03 elements in here. Whatcha think?

Happy 116th Birthday, Al! (June 7th) I thought it would be great to publish this on his birthday! He's happy for now. Note my word choice of 'for now'.

Sorry Al, you just can't catch a break. Your happiness is about to pop like a soap bubble. Oops.


	8. Countryside

Al didn't notice that anything was wrong- at first. He knocked on the door several times, each set gradually increasing in volume until Al was sure he was going to knock down the door from its hinges. Even then, with no response, Al wasn't the least bit worried. They must be in the workshop, with the welding machines, which make a lot of noise. Yes, that's it. He was sure they wouldn't mind if he let himself in, so Al grasped the tarnished doorknob, and turned. When the knob gave way without any resistance, Al smiled. It was just like Auntie and Winry to leave the front door unlocked, and there was little need to lock it in a tiny village like Resembool.

Al stepped into the much cooler indoors, quiet as a library and nearly as empty as one in the foyer.

Silence. Absolute silence.

Al could hear himself breathe. The grinding and hissing of welding wasn't reaching Al's ears like he had expected it to. Instead, silence met where other noises weren't. If the house was this quiet, why couldn't they hear him banging on the door?

He stepped inside, leaving the door ajar, and peered around the corner into the sitting room, searching for a sleeping Auntie Pinako or Winry, but found nothing. What he did notice was a fine layer of dust on every surface in the sitting room, accompanied by a cold, unlived-in air. It was as if no one had set foot into the house for several weeks, if not months. A few glances into the kitchen and workshop solidified Al's theory, though he was intrigued by how a fork had lodged itself into the wall near the breakfast table. One abandoned plate, piled high with mouldy bacon, eggs, and toast sat in front of what was Ed's chair, which had been tipped over onto its back. Someone had jumped from their seat and left the house in a hurry, right before breakfast, and Al could only wonder why.

A few dishes that looked like the aftermath of pancake fixings sat gathering dust and mold in the sink. He couldn't imagine why Auntie or Winry would leave the kitchen in such a state.

"Oh, of course!" Al muttered to himself, pressing a palm to his forehead. It'd be just his luck if Winry had left for Rush Valley for the Autumn just before he came to visit. Auntie Pinako could have left for Central for one of her automail patients, and now Al was alone in their house. And he'd come all this way to visit them!

He also needed to tell her what had become of her best friend.

Discordant chiming startled Al out of his reverie. Al raised his eyes up to the top of the stairs, where the clock lay on its side, glass face shattered but otherwise unharmed. Al clomped up the dusty stairs to take a closer look.

Glittering shards of glass littered the floor like sharp, glistening snow. Much smaller, smashed pieces clung to the wood and runner in a powdery grit.

Now Al was concerned. Just what had happened here while he was away?

He struggled to lift the heavy clock away from the mess of shattered glass, making note that the clock had a long, thin slash across the wooden backside. He traced the gash with his fingers, remembering to ask Winry or Auntie Pinako the next time he saw them.

This thought brought him back to speculating just what had taken place in the Rockbell house while he was away. Maybe Auntie and Winry had left quickly for an emergency, and someone robbed their house while they were out taking care of a patient.

Al searched through his memories of the Rockbell house for anything of value someone might have stolen. Auntie and Winry's tools definitely had some value, but nothing in the workshop was missing, not even the completed automail models.

Winry's jewelry box on the endtable just inside her room was sitting in its rightful place, piles of tangled chains and rows of earrings still intact. Not even the delicate gold chain Auntie Pinako had given her for her fourteenth birthday was missing. A thief that neglected Winry's extensive collection of necklaces wasn't very good at their profession.

Al squinted down at the dusty floor, gears turning. Winry's jewelry, the tools, the rainy-day fund was still under Ed's bed in their guest room, and Auntie Pinako's- Auntie Pinako! Al had to suppress the urge to slap his palm to his forehead. He had missed the most obvious. Auntie Pinako was entering her seventies, so of course she would have nearly twice as many material valuables as Winry in the way of jewelry.

As Al crossed the hallway, to Auntie Pinako's room, he began to notice a strange smell in the air. He brushed it off as the fumes from the mouldy food downstairs finally wafting into the upper part of the house, but when he reached the door, the odour only intensified.

When he pulled the door open, an abhorrent stench hit his nose. Al groaned and pulled his shirt collar up to cover it and provide some meagre protection from the stink, but its nauseating reek permeated the thin cotton. Al hadn't smelled this in a while, but its fetor was unmistakable. It was the stink of death and decay.

Mister Schmidt's piglet had somehow wandered into the river and washed up downstream. From there, it decomposed to a mass of bloated flesh and maggots until Al had discovered it one day. He was five, so he went running home to his mother bawling about a stinky alien laying by the river. His mother had taken care of it, and with even a decade and the obstacle of not having a nose to smell with, the intensity of that stench had stayed with him.

Al stepped further into the room, and the smell grew so Al's stomach was roiling. His gut rolled and flipped until Al thought he couldn't stand it any longer.

He turned around the bed and caught a glimpse of something bone-white and wriggling, and a sickly purple-green-grey mass of something.

Al's stomach wrenched out of his abdominal retched right onto the floor, whatever little was in his stomach emptying onto the hardwood.

Al staggered into the wall and down the stairs, shoes crunching unevenly on the powdered grit of the clock face still dusted over the top steps. Al's foot missed a stair, and his body wobbled uneasily before toppling down onto the landing. He braced himself on the railing, wave after wave of nausea ripping through his throat and gut. The stench followed him.

It seemed as though his nausea had sharpened his eyes as he stumbled down the stairs and into the now obvious details shook and wobbled from his / There was a skid mark of a shoe from someone running to the door from something or someone. And over there, long thin slash marks across the stairwell wall he hadn't noticed.

Right before the front door, deep scores had been clawed into the floor and in the surrounding wall. Someone's fingernails had torn into the wooden floor hard enough to dislodge long gauges.

In the centre of the door, right at someone's eye level, two identical cuts had been sliced straight through the wood, spaced at exactly one human head's-width. In front of the scratches, a single dried drop of blood pooled between Al's feet.

Al pushed the scarred door open wider with trembling hands.

He continued in this lurching, wobbling manner until he came across Miss Schmidt riding to town on her horse-cart. She greeted him, and when he didn't reply, and continued staring at the ground with glassy eyes, she hopped off of the mare's back and took his face in her hands.

"Alphonse? Alphonse, look up at me! Alphonse Thomas Elric, you will tell me what's wrong this moment-" Miss Schmidt's crow's-feet-lined eyes widened. Her face paled considerably. "Alphonse, you're as white as a sheet and sweating like a glass of water on a hot day! And what's this on the side of your mouth?" Miss Schmidt raised her hand to wipe at it with the back of her hand. "Is this...bile?"

Miss Schmidt shook his shoulders a little. "What happened to you?" Al didn't reply.

Before long, Al was holed up in the closest thing Resembool had to a town meeting place- the Kraus family's barn. A mug of hot tea cooling in his hands and a quilt around his hunched shoulders, Al endured questioning by all of the town's residents that he didn't even try to acknowledge. The first time he spoke after leaving the Rockbell house was long after the sun had dipped behind Resembool's foothills. All heads turned his way and hushed whispers died down as began to speak.

"How long has it been since any of you have heard from Winry or Auntie Pinako?" Al whispered. A few mutters went around the room as people cross-checked their facts with others, and then relayed them to the neighbours around them. It was Nelly who piped up out of the crowd.

Her eyebrows were raised high up into her high forehead, and knitted together in concern. Her long brown hair was in long wet strands, having obviously just gotten out of the bath.

"Al, we all assumed Winry had gone to Rush Valley for the autumn. We haven't seen her since July." Nelly said, her voice becoming quieter with each word. "W-why? What happened?"

"And no one went to check on Auntie Pinako?" Al's hands were beginning to tremble once again.

"We all thought she went off to take care of an out-of-town automail patient. Last time anyone saw her was…" A short murmur coursed through the crowd. "...yeah. July."

Miss Schmidt stepped forwards this time. She crouched in front of Al, hesitated, and asked, "What does this have to do with what happened to you?"

Al's mug fell out of his hands and shattered on the floor. The now cold tea leaked out in a dark puddle all around the broken, yellowed remains.

"Something happened to them." Al spewed out, grabbing short handfuls of his hair. The memories he had tried so hard to shut out were streaming back. "You have to go, you have to find them, something's wrong-"

"Al, I don't understand what you're saying-"

"Auntie Pinako was murdered!"

The buzz that had begun to ripple through the people went dead silent.

"No, not Pinako Rockbell."

"Certainly not. Al, are you sure about this?"

"I don't believe a word of it. Boy's probably gone a bit nutty. You hear what happened to his brother? Done popped off, and only sixteen too!"

"William, don't say things like that!"

"Is it true, daddy? Is Auntie Pinako dead?"

"I say we go up there and check it out!"

"Everyone, _quiet_!" Miss Schmidt's shout silenced the crowd's growing volume. Al, who had begun to cry, hiccoughed at her sudden yell. "You know Al wouldn't lie about something like that."

"You there." Two grown men jumped to attention at Miss Schmidt's austere glare."Go to the Rockbell's. Nelly, use the train station's phone to call the Elgach City police force. And… and the county coroner."

The people Miss Schmidt had recruited snapped their hands up to their brows in respectful salutes, and set off to do as they were told. The rest of the town was left to speculate in hushed voices, and send worried glances Al's way.

Al sat in a corner with Miss Schmidt, her hand rubbing his back in a comforting gesture that he remembered his mother doing when he was sick. In the short span of a few hours, Al had regressed nearly ten years. He was lost. He was alone. In a the short span of a few hours, the entire Rockbell line was exterminated. Just like when his brother had become a thing, Al was numb. The only thing he could feel was hopelessness creeping up into his soul as an icy shadow. Whoever had done this had left him completely alone.

Al didn't fall asleep that night. He didn't dream. All he had was the sounds of the crickets and occasional hoots of night animals to keep him company until the sun rose. Through the guest bedroom window in Mister and Miss Schmidt's house, the sunrise was a deep red.

_000_

Sunday afternoon, right after everyone had lunch, the population of Resembool gathered once again in the Kraus's barn. Even the brand-new, squalling babies were present, gathered in their mother's arms in linen blankets.

The two men Miss Schmidt had ordered to the Rockbell's house commanded everyone's attention by banging on a cow bell with a wooden spoon. A few mothers of infants voiced their dissent to this method (with the men's own wooden spoons to their heads), and after the men had nursed their wounds for an adequate amount of time, they cleared their throats and announced that all children needed to leave the barn and find something to do. Everyone knew that they would all listen at the doorway to the barn, but shooing them away would keep them in arm's reach if things got a bit too graphic.

Lawrence said, just a tad too loudly. "The house was a complete wreck."

Theodore, who was just a few years Lawrence's junior, added to this. "Huge scratch marks on the floor, gashes in the wall, and the clock was completely destroyed. Everything was covered in dust."

"So this must've happened a while ago, and we all didn't know. We didn't notice Auntie Pinako hadn't come and gotten her bread or eggs for an entire month."

"Based on the amount of dust gathering on all the surfaces," a man who had chaperoned the two younger men to the Rockbell house observed, "I'd hazard a guess that no one has been in that house for at least a month."

"Lenny, get to the point. Is Pinako dead or not?"

The older man's wrinkles became much more defined. His frown lessened, and the look on his face was the only answer the town needed. The air seemed to whoosh out of the room.

"We found her. It. Too short to be her own bedroom, too."

A loud sniffle came from a curly-haired woman somewhere in the middle of the crowd.

"Well, who did it? Surely no one here could do such a thing!"

"The police and the coroner came last night. I've got a copy of the versions of the reports they plan to release to the public here, if you want me to read them."

A murmur of assent. A few people who didn't have the stomach for such things left quietly, shaking their heads in disbelief all the way.

"Police Report: Elgach City PD. Date: August twenty-fourth, 1915. Time: Nine-oh-six-"

"Get on with it!"

Lenny sent a glare at the general direction of the outburst, and continued on.

"Victim is Pinako Rockbell,female, age seventy-nine, identified by the engagement ring on her finger and unusually short stature. Time of death is estimated to be a month prior to discovery of corpse, based on stage of decomposition. Cause of death is a single hole to the back of the head, going clean through to the forehead. Death was most likely instantaneous."

The pages rustled as Lenny flipped over to the second page. "Only pieces of evidence are the scratches all over the floor, the smashed clock, and gashes present on several walls. Holes identical to the one in the victim's head are present in the front door and the victim's bedroom door. There are no eyewitnesses, and no suspects. The discoverer of the corpse has an alibi. All of the interrogated townspeople have alibis. Most likely a cold case."

Lenny squinted down at a short, handwritten note squeezed in at the very bottom of the page in blotchy ink.

"ADDENDUM: The body of Winry Rockbell, the victim's granddaughter (age sixteen), is nowhere to be found. She was confirmed to be living with her grandmother at the time of the murder, but her disappearance makes it impossible to investigate her possibility as a suspect. Captain Haus-Hermann, Eglach City Police."

The silence following Lenny's reading was absolute. Everyone was stunned.

"So that's it, then." Someone whispered.

Lenny nodded. He placed the thin stack of paper back into its brown envelope, and finished with, "Alphonse has it hard. His brother died in the coup, his surrogate grandmother is dead, and his best friend is missing. How about we all make this easier for him, and make sure he's happy while he copes with his loss."

Solemn assent came from all sides. Soon, people began to slowly empty out of the barn, and trail back to their houses, shaking their heads at the cruelty of the world.

Miss Schmidt waved goodbye to the last exiting person, and after she was sure they were out of earshot, she turned to face what seemed to be empty darkness.

"Al, I know you're in here."

Silence.

"You were supposed to stay at the house."

A few moments passed, but soon Al's golden hair and eyes loomed out of the shadows, his eyes cast downwards.

"So that's it, then." He said, no trace of emotion in his voice. "That's it." This time, his voice cracked in the middle of his sentence, and the floodgates opened.

"Auntie Pinako is dead. My brother is gone. I have no idea where the last person who could be any semblance of family to me is, and I'm alone! Alone!" He sobbed, hiding his face in his hands. "I'm tired of it! I just want to live a happy life with the people I love, and somehow, the universe doesn't think I deserve even that little! I-"

Al's voice cut off. Miss Schmidt had strode forward with the authority of a General, wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and pulled him to her chest in a warm, maternal embrace.

"Alphonse, listen to me." She said softly. "You're angry. You're sad. You feel more alone than you ever have in all of your life. But, I need you to listen to me. You are never completely alone. Don't you ever dare to say you are completely alone."

"You have people here who have known and loved you like their own sons since your birth. Even when your mother died, you were brought in with your brother by the entire town. We take care of our own."

"You have friends who care for you. I know you do. Winry told us all about the people you've met in the last few years that you've told her about. Friends are family you choose."

Miss Schmidt squeezed him a bit tighter. The tears had almost completely stopped now. "And even though it hurts now, it will get better. You'll heal. Pinako would want you to. We'll all get over this grief together. Don't you worry, Alphonse. Our wounds will heal together."

Miss Schmidt finally let go, and held him at arm's length, her eyes more tender and more feeling than Al had ever seen them. She smiled gently, the slightest tinge of sadness in her grey eyes.

"And who knows? Winry is missing, not gone. We can all hope and heal. Grief makes you stronger as you grow from it. This, I know."

Miss Schmidt let go and opened the barn door, shoving it open with her shoulder and motioning for Al to go. "Now, what do you say about a little baking?"

_000_

Al sat in bed a few nights later, belly full of peach pie and roast chicken, staring at the sky. Miss Schmidt's words had stuck with him, and he made sure he wouldn't forget a single word. He hadn't cried since she had spoken to him.

The only other thing he made sure he would remember was the contents of the police/coroner report. There was something very strange about the whole affair. Resembool was over three hours out of the way of any city in any direction, and the only people to visit were supply men, and they didn't even leave the station. Even the occasional visit from the military didn't stray from the train station. The only people to leave from the train station, who weren't really townspeople, were Ed and Al.

Winry definitely couldn't have done this. There was no way she could have. Al was in the hospital in July. And Brother, well, there was an obvious reason he couldn't have done it. Even Brother's resident thing didn't have a motive for doing anything to Pinako Rockbell.

Al shook his head and rolled over onto his side, running a finger over the seams on his pillow. He couldn't place just what felt wrong about the whole situation. There were no clues, and it was a cold case. He understood that they couldn't apprehend anyone without evidence or suspects. For all intents and purposes, this was already a closed case.

Al couldn't help but want to solve it on his own. Maybe he wanted to do it for Auntie Pinako, or maybe he wanted to solve what made him feel like something was off about the case. He couldn't, though. He had no resources and no investigative training, and he'd have to be happy with the best the police could do.

A masculine voice said something, far away in a memory.

" _Yeah, we ran a prostitution bust last Thursday. The military seems to be taking more and more cases from the police. We have more jurisdiction, but if you ask me, the police need to handle police matters. All of these cases keep me away from my darling Elicia more and more!... Say, Al, if you wanna help, you can. I'm sure you caught onto some investigative tricks while hanging around your brother and the Colonel. You've got the brains and the brawn. What do you say?"_

Oh, that's right! Al did catch onto investigative procedures, and being in a suit of armour with no other senses did sharpen his visual observation skills.

Al sat up and stared at his open suitcase, sitting on the vanity on the other side of the room.

He'd start tomorrow. He could do this. He'd solve this- for Auntie Pinako. He couldn't be sure he'd do a better job than the police, who were trained for this, but it'd make him feel like he was doing something, not just waiting around for the answers to come.

He'd better get to work.

_000_

Agh! I was going to put this up earlier, but my computer went completely kaput on me, and now I'm typing this on a borrowed laptop. (binge-watching SCRUBS might have had a part in this, but shhhh. I didn't tell you that.)

We finally got to Resembool. From here, I think we've got about ~30 chapters until this whole thing ends. Wow, the time flies by. Chapter eight already! Soon, this'll all be over and I'll have to fix all the plotholes and rewrite. I am not looking forward to that.

Ohohoho? Winry's body is nowhere to be found? Didn't she die, though? *curious prodding*

So, sound off in the reviews/comments, whatever form of feedback on the website you're reading this on. What am I doing right? What do I need to polish up on a bit? Any plotholes? What do you think is going to happen next? Feedback is author food, people. (No seriously. I need to feed my fifteen starving help us.) I'm thankful for all of the people that have reviewed so far. Thanks for your opinions!


	9. Murderess Eyes

Alphonse couldn't immediately start on work like he wanted to. Miss Schmidt got him up at the crack of dawn each morning, fed him breakfast, and sent him out into the fields with her husband and nephew. The hours until Miss Schmidt finished her work inside the house and started breakfast were filled with hard labour in the hot, late August sun. Al's blisters on the first day of work were so bad that he had to wear gloves to pick up a fork. His body wasn't used to all of this hard work yet, and so it was probably not good for his weakened muscles to jump right into it, but Miss Schmidt didn't know that. Al wasn't going to tell her.

Miss Schmidt might have needed help with her fields, but her husband and nephew were built like Briggs bears, and seemed to had done quite well before Al was in the picture. No, she could've had him stay inside and sleep and they'd have gotten the same amount of work done.

With the combination of Miss Schmidt's austere personality and Al's...situation, Al guessed that Miss Schmidt wanted the hard work to distract him from his grief. Yes, That was probably her reason.

The hoe slipped from Al's sweat-slicked hands once more, and raked against his angry, healing blisters. Al hissed a noise of pain. The blisters certainly _looked_ better, but they certainly didn't _feel_ better.

Al frowned at the painful blisters. He wished he had asked for those gloves Mister Schmidt and Adam had donned; it would saved him a lot of pain.

Al rewrapped his hands into the cotton of his shirt and resumed digging the hoe into the ground.

Miss Schmidt called them into lunch when the sun was at its highest in the sky. Al welcomed the break from being baked like a Winter Solstice turkey as he stepped into the shady, cool house. He took in a great breath of air, smelling the food waiting for the three men in the kitchen. Was that…beef?

Miss Schmidt ushered them inside.

"If I let all of this cool air out because of you-" Miss Schmidt threatened, shutting the door behind them with a snap. Adam nodded and laughed, though upon catching a glimpse of Miss Schmidt's coolly composed face, reconsidered and turned it into a cough. Al thought that was a wise decision on his part.

"Thank you for lunch, Miss Schmidt."

"Thanks, dear."

"Yeah, Auntie."

"Well, don't let it get cold!"

The three men each took turns serving themselves some of Miss Schmidt's famous spiced beef. Based on the smell alone, Al could tell it would be delicious. Right on time, his stomach gave a loud, empty growl, and Al prepared to dig in. Just as he speared a piece of it on his fork, Miss Schmidt cleared her throat and asked him something he wished she hadn't.

"Al, what were you and your brother doing while you were away?" Miss Schmidt said, quiet, though with just enough force to make all the men pause.

Al hesitated. Should he tell her? No, brother wouldn't want him to. Brother wasn't here, though. Miss Schmidt had been so kind- but would she be kind after she learnt what they had done?

"I mean, you come back thin as a rail and your brother's… passed on." Miss Schmidt. "I apologise. I shouldn't be asking you this after...my curiosity got the better of me."

Adam, Mister Schmidt, and Miss Schmidt were all peering at him now, though Adam and Mister Schmidt with more curiosity than concern. Al fidgeted in his seat, tugging at the hem of his shirt.

 _You owe her._

"No, I…" Al fidgeted a bit more, and glanced over at Mister Schmidt and Adam. "I'd…"

 _You trust her._

"Rather not?" Mister Schmidt piped up in his gruff voice, fork still barely a centimetre from his mouth.

 _She won't tell anyone._

"No, Richard." Miss Schmidt said to him, her strong eyes still focused on Al. "Adam, Richard, you can finish your lunch in the sitting room."

 _She trusts you._

"But, Auntie-"

"And you will close the door." She finished, sending an austere glance Adam's way. Richard nodded and stood, while it took a bit for Adam to realise what she had asked.

"Go on, Adam." Miss Schmidt waved him away to her homey sitting room, and as soon as she was sure that the door had shut soundly, Miss Schmidt turned to face him.

Miss Schmidt motioned for him to continue eating. Al didn't feel hungry anymore, and even if he wanted to, his hands were now clamped together so tightly in his lap for it seemed unlikely he would relax them for several years.

"Al, if you truly don't want to tell me, it is perfectly alright. I can call Adam and Richard back in here if you want me to."

"No." Al said. Miss Schmidt's crow's-lined eyes widened for half a second, but then softened. She laid her outstretched arm back onto the table.

"You can start when you feel ready." Miss Schmidt murmured, leaning back into her chair.

"If I start when I'm ready, I'll never tell you." Al replied. The slightest hint of a weak laugh was in his voice, though this was soon extinguished like a candle flame on a windy night.

Al cleared his throat and picked at his shirtsleeves. He scratched at the table and his hands. Once he had made his third sweep of all of the room's exits, he braved himself to stare into Miss Schmidt's eyes. When he did begin, his voice was hollow and distant.

"My mother died in 1904 from a plague. I was four years old. My...broth- Edward was five years old. We were too young."

At the very mention of his mother, Miss Schmidt's arms uncrossed, and she leaned forward, her face almost pained.

Behind the sitting room door, ears pressed as flatly to the wood as was possible, Adam and Mister Schmidt chewed at their lunch and listened with rapt attention.

His mother's death. Hohenheim's disappearance and its effect on what was to happen. And…

"His notes. There were huge stacks of them. Books, booklets- I imagine there were thousands of pages. We were only interested in one of the subjects he covered, and that was human transmutation."

The phrase didn't register with Miss Schmidt. She cocked her head, slightly befuddled, and quirked an eyebrow.

"Namely, bringing the dead back to life."

It took a few moments. Only when Alphonse saw horror dawning in her eyes and every drop of colour in her skin draining and leaving it paper-white was he sure that she understood.

"Oh, Alphonse, you _didn't_."

Al was going too smoothly to stop now."We found a teacher and we learnt everything we needed. Our dad had alchemy notes, we had money to buy...ingredients, and the training to do such a thing. We were ready to bring our mother back."

Miss Schmidt was now staring down at the wooden table, hands clapped over her mouth.

"The thing we brought back wasn't human. And it wasn't even our _mother_."

Al swallowed thickly. "Equivalent exchange cost my brother his arm and his leg. I lost my body. For four years, I was a soul bonded to a suit of armour."

She stood up from her chair after he finished his sentence, and began to pace the room, completely silent. Al didn't stop.

"We were searching for something to get my body back the entire time we were gone. The legendary philosopher's stone was our main goal- until we found out it was made from human lives."

Miss Schmidt gasped aloud behind him. He heard her brace herself against an endtable. He didn't know if he should stop or keep going, and certainly didn't want Miss Schmidt to collapse. For several seconds, he was uncertain, until Miss Schmidt urged him to go on.

"We uncovered a conspiracy while we were searching."

Telling her would put her in danger. She would have to swear to not tell anyone.

"Miss Schmidt, if I tell you this part, it could put you in danger."

She rounded the table and sat across from him. Instead of covering her eyes again, she grasped the hands he had placed on the tabletop a few seconds ago, and fixed him with a stare.

"Alphonse. I need to know so I can help you. I can swear not to let anyone else know, but I still need to know."

So Al told her. He told her about the homunculi, their powers, the deaths, his brother's epiphany, the war in Ishval, Father, the upper levels of the military, and the Promised Day. Miss Schmidt was quiet for his entire monologue, until he mentioned that his brother had brought him back from the Gate.

"Wait," She held up a hand to halt him. "If your brother reclaimed his arm, and you reclaimed your body, where is Edward? I thought he passed on."

Al's hands tightened around hers. They tightened almost painfully so. Dead, flat golden eyes bore into his once again, and he was back in that courtyard. His elbows were painfully angular, his hair was long. Horrible adrenaline spiked its rushing embrace around his thin chest and through his skeletal limbs.

"Alphonse?"

Miss Schmidt's voice brought Al back to the present. Only once he registered her concerned expression and sweating hands did he realise he had zoned out again, lost in terrible memories.

"I'm sorry, Miss Schmidt." He stopped to ready himself. This was where it all fell apart. Here, in his memory, is where it all became tinted with sombre grey. "My brother isn't dead."

He cleared his throat and began again. "My brother isn't dead. The homunculus Pride...stole his body. I don't know where he is, I don't know what he's doing. He could be murdering innocent people or trying to fix Father's mistakes. I wouldn't be any the wiser. Now, Winry's missing, Auntie Pinako is dead, and I'm all alone."

Miss Schmidt let go of his hands. "You want to go to that house again, don't you."

Al nodded.

"I can't stop you. Just promise me that you'll go after today's work is finished, alright?"

Miss Schmidt didn't mention it again, and so Al was out for the next several hours, hoeing a small patch of dirt behind the house. He didn't know why they made him hoe this dirt. They didn't plant anything in the late summer, except maybe lettuce and certain herbs. Mister Schmidt put him to work harvesting apples and potatoes until sunset. When Mister Schmidt and Adam went inside to get dinner, Al went upstairs to get his borrowed knapsack, and set off down the road on a course for the empty Rockbell house.

The familiar, cheery yellow face of the Rockbell house loomed out of the red sunset. Rather than a familiar home for friends and a resting place for visits, the only emotion Al felt rise up in him was foreboding. Anything could jump out of the darkening shadows at any second, and Al didn't have the advantage of being virtually invincible anymore. His body was flesh now, flesh that could be hurt, and now any danger was magnified tenfold.

Al placed his hand on the burnished gold doorknob and turned.

He was instantly greeted with the thick smell of must and overbearing darkness, like a blindfold over his eyes, suffocating and overbearing. The generator had been cut off months ago because no one paid the electric bill, and Al thought this only served to make the house more sinister in the late evening sun.

Al flicked on his torch and ventured further inside. In the living room, a fiery red glow from the setting sun lit the dusty floorboards in dim, smouldering squares. He suppressed a shudder as he passed the workshop and pitch-black staircase. He didn't want to go upstairs. Not where Granny Pinako had died.

There was nothing out of place in the workshop, or in the sitting room, though Al noted that rotten dough of some sort speckled the sofa's green cushions. He couldn't know what caused that, so he filed the observation in the back of his mind for later.

In the kitchen, the sink was piled with dishes, and the rubbish bucket filled with rotting food and scraps of paper. The kitchen table had a plate filled with rotting food, and with a close once-over that ended with Al's gag reflex being triggered, he identified the molding remains as bacon, eggs, and toast. The fork was missing, embedded into the wall by the breakfast chair Ed sat in, which had been pushed back far away from the table, as if someone had risen suddenly. Winry's chair had fallen to the floor at a skewed angle. Had she jumped?

Al smiled a little at the image of Winry crouching on her chair like a frog and leaping out of it, hands extended and ready to attack.

He followed a trail of shoe skid marks to the foyer, where they came to an abrupt stop only a metre from the door. No sign of forced entry, Al observed. Directly in front of this final skid mark was the single droplet of blood, and then the gouges in the floor and walls. Someone had violently struggled against something right where Al was standing.

He crouched right on top of them and ran a finger down the length of a particularly deep one. Underneath his blistered fingertip, a small sliver of something creamy white was brushed out of the gouge. Al held it up close to his eyes between thumb and forefinger, examining it from all angles.

 _This is a fingernail!_ Al realised. _Why is it- oh._

Someone had ripped their nails through the floor.

Al remembered something like this. Actually, two somethings like this. Two somethings that involved screaming, philosopher's stones, and people he knew and loved.

Ling shrieking and scrabbling at the hard stone floor of Father's lair. Brother screaming and scraping at the the courtyard's bricks.

Ice crept in around his core, freezing his stomach rock solid.

Auntie Pinako was killed by a single slit through her head.

No.

Brother's place at the table was set.

 _It's not possible._

Winry was missing.

 _There's no way._

The hands raking through the wood were Winry's white work-calloused ones. The hair spilling over the scarred floor were long blond waves. A glowing carmine pulse beat through all of her veins to the rhythm of her exploding-pounding heart. The screams piercing the air were Winry's shrill shrieks. Above her, stoic and cold, Ed's body and Pride's eyes stared down without a trace of a reaction. Only a hungry flash of something akin to sadistic pleasure or pride shone.

Al reared back and hit a wall. Every noise was suddenly so loud, he could hear the creaks in the floorboards, he could see the world tilting sideways and careening every which way, his knees became water, and darkness rushed in.

Alphonse collapsed to the floor amidst long gashes in a quickly darkening foyer and didn't stir for several hours.

_000_

I love doing this to my cinnamon bun,,,


	10. The Succubus

_Pride didn't have to wait long for the girl's eyes to shoot open, wide and glassy and a familiar shade of orchid. She didn't move. The only movements Pride's enhanced eyesight could see were the rising and falling of her laboured breathing._

 _She then twitched so violently that Pride's eyebrows shot up into his hairline. He knelt down beside her, being careful not to kneel on her long, sweat-slicked blond hair, and began to make observations. He rose each of her arms, letting them fall limply back to the floor when he let go. Her pulse was rapid and wild, and up close, Pride could see her eyes were twitching and almost vibrating. He sighed. He was afraid this would happen. At least she had taken hold- she would need some work, but it could be done, even after she had been revived. He couldn't imagine what would've happened if both he and Father were put out of action- there would go all hopes of a plan B._

 _Her eyes pulsed a vibrant blue for maybe half a second. He needed to get her stabilised, and soon._

 _He patted his pockets. Did he have enough for two train tickets?_

 _"I'll be right back, Lust."_

_000_

In a hotel room overlooking the streets of Elgach City, Pride lazed on the windowsill, finger marking his place in some esoteric text. He stared out the window down at the humans milling about underneath it, small like ants from this fourth-floor view. His eyes held some sort of cold superiority, like one looks at a bug crossing over one's shoe.

He heard his companion bustling around at the mirror on the far end of the room, opening drawers and testing their suitabilities for something, creaking the mirror into the right position, rustling around on the seat. She hummed something monotone and would cause a normal person some unease with the slightly off sound of her voice. Her voice was that of a young woman's, though with a strange note of something almost chilling. A kind of frigidity, or detachment, maybe.

"Edward?" She crooned. Pride's ever-present scowl deepened.

"I told you not to call me that."

"Do I care?"

Pride frowned. He hadn't expected this Lust to have the previous Lust's whip-smart attitude and sharp intelligence, and Pride was still getting used to their uncanny similarities.

"Do you ever get used to their voices?" Lust asked, messing with the Xingese book on the table in front of her. Her expression was at odds with her question: complete nonchalance.

"It takes a bit," Pride answered. "But-"

The change was so subtle, anyone but a homunculus wouldn't have been able to detect it from the air alone. In the time between Pride reopening his book and Lust throwing her long blond hair over her shoulder, the person sitting at the mirror was no longer his sister. The girl's hands froze in the middle of combing through her tresses and began to shake uncontrollably. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her turn around very, very slowly to get a good look at him.

"That's no good, Lust. You have to keep her under control." Pride said, flipping a page in his book. He met the girl's widened, glassy blue eyes. She started violently when scarlet met blue.

She gulped and asked, with herculean effort, "Can...I talk to hi-m?" She finished in a shaking whisper.

How fun.

"Are you afraid of me?" He whispered. A wolfish grin spread across his face, sending apprehensive shivers down her spine. He could see all the blond hairs on her arms and neck raising up on end as he continued to stare at her. "You have good reason to."

She swallowed loudly.

"Why not?" He let go.

A trembling jerked down from his head to his chest, then to his fingers and feet, just as his pupils dilated to almost catlike proportions. The irises faded from crimson to gold.

He took in a deep, heavy breath.

_000_

The world came into focus around Ed. He seemed to be sitting on a window sill of some sort, looking over a familiar skyline that tickled something in his memory that he couldn't place. In his slack hands was a book in Cretan, of all things, the cover a deep burgundy. Leather.

He looked over into the room to see the exact person he was hoping for, staring at him with widened and clearly afraid blue eyes. He sprung to his feet.

 _"Winry-"_

Before she could answer, the world went dark again.

_000_

The same change went over him, his eyes going from gold to scarlet, his expression from anguish to cold disdain.

"There you go. He's still alive."

He heard the beginnings of a sob from her side of the room, then an unexpected cutoff. Tuneless humming resumed.

Pride went back to his book.

_000_

Lust opened the last drawer on the bottom of the vanity, where three very important things sat in a velvet-lined case. She flipped the clasps and carefully opened the mahogany lid.

A vial of shining red stones, an 1874 map of Amestris, some sites circled in black calligraphy ink, and a long Xingese dagger wrapped in black silk gleamed dully up at her.

If possible, Lust's closed-lipped smile widened even farther. She shut the box.

 _Click_.

_000_

In Miss Schmidt's bedroom, the moment Al collapsed far, far down the road, Miss Schmidt suddenly sat up. Her heart was pounding, and she was nauseous almost to the point of vomiting.

Miss Schmidt placed her novel down on her bedside table. She hunched over and pinched the bridge of her nose and took in a deep breath. Once the nausea had faded to a manageable rolling in the pit of her stomach, Miss Schmidt threw the quilt off of her legs and wobbled to her feet. She slipped on her house shoes, pulled her cotton dressing-gown around herself tighter, and tottered out of her room.

The electric light in the bathroom was on. A thin wedge of light shined into Al's ajar doorway. She didn't hear him snoring softly, like she usually did, and this struck her as odd.

"Al?" She called softly, pushing the door open wider. "Al, are you awake?"

She was greeted by an empty room, the curtains yanked back wide to show a deep blue sky dotted with stars. His sheets were rumpled, his pillow facing the wall, and an open suitcase sat on her grandmother's old rocking chair.

 _He'll come back in a bit,_ she told herself. _I'd better go back to bed now._

She began to exit his room when his open suitcase once again caught her eye. She shouldn't pry, but…

 _No, Schmidt!_ She shook herself. _Respect his privacy. Nosing around will only bring you trouble, and it'll make it harder for Alphonse to trust you!_

The suitcase sat innocently on the rocking chair.

Miss Schmidt peeked out into the hallway at the bathroom door.

She peeked at the suitcase.

She peeked again at the bathroom door.

And before she knew it, she was crossing the room and settling the suitcase in her lap, and feeling guilt already rising up in her chest.

 _These are his personal things!_

 _How much trouble can a fifteen-year-old boy get into, anyway?_

 _How would you like it if he rooted through your dresser drawers?_

This gave her pause.

 _Well, he doesn't have a secret stash of-_

 _Maybe he has a stash of something he doesn't want you to see. You wouldn't know._

 _Which is exactly why you don't know what kind of things could be hidden in this suitcase!_

A board creaked in the hallway, and Miss Schmidt froze. Once she had judged that it was just an old-house noise, she restarted her inner monologue.

 _What's the value of privacy these days?_

 _Don't you want to know what he's got in here?_

Miss Schmidt was an endlessly nosy woman. Of course she wanted to know. This single thought stopped the two warring opinions to go silent.

Miss Schmidt was also a mother. With Alphonse's far-fetched stories about homunculi, and all those horrible ideas about a 'philosopher's' stone being made from human lives, she was too worried to let anything slip past her surrogate mother's net of security.

She peeled back the first layer of clothes, pants, socks, and train ticket stubs to get to the bottom of the suitcase, which brought her to much more interesting objects.

She pulled out two leather-bound notebooks, the contents of which she couldn't decipher, a frame stuffed with photographs, pens, a cloth napkin covered in feverish writing, loose change, another notebook, this time bound in parchment and tightly tied twine, and a white cloth pouch with a single scuffed screw, matches, and chalk inside.

Her fingers came back a powdery white after digging around in the white pouch. She set that aside and wiped her fingers on her nightdress. She couldn't read the writing on the napkin, and the change and pens were of no use to her, so Miss Schmidt decided to look through all of the photographs in the frame.

Miss Schmidt smiled wistfully at the first picture: one of Edward and Alphonse, probably four and five, with Trisha, her face blurred but still clearly joyous. She knew exactly why Alphonse carried this one around.

The next was of three children playing, all with blond hair and all plastered with filth and rain.

The third was of a boy she, at first, didn't recognise. Once she did, Miss Schmidt gasped a little and covered her mouth. This boy, with the dead eyes and missing limbs, was Edward. She could see Winry's little white hand and a strange man's massive leather gauntlet reaching forward in hesitant concern. At least this part of Alphonse's story had checked out. Pinako had told the town that an accident at the rail station had taken Edward's limbs, and that was the last Miss Schmidt had seen of the two boys until Edward was thirteen and Alphonse was twelve.

The next was a formal portrait of Ed in a tacky red coat and leather pants, his chin tipped high and his arms folded. A huge suit of armour, covered in spikes, stood timidly to the side. It was so tall it was out of frame. She was about to flip to the next one, when she saw a silver chain gleaming from Edward's belt loops.

"Huh," She said, squinting. Ed had a bit of an affinity for gaudy fashion.

Miss Schmidt flipped to the next one, and couldn't hold in a mournful sigh. It was Winry and Pinako, formal dresses and wide smiles and all. She affectionately noted that Pinako's damned pipe was still at her side.

The last photograph was puzzling. At first, all Miss Schmidt thought it was a throwaway, some sort of mistake in the darkroom, but when she looked closer, she could see angular elbows and long hair. The arms were too skinny to be Winry or Edward, and Alphonse certainly couldn't have been that thin after lugging that massive suit of armour around for- what, two years?

Miss Schmidt heard the toilet flush and the sink turn on. She started, and shoved everything back into Alphonse's suitcase with fervour. The socks were going with the notebooks, the photographs with the pants, and the pens were shoved deep in the recesses behind some trousers.

The bathroom door opened and shut before Miss Schmidt could fully hide herself or escape. With her fifty-plus years of experience lying, bending the truth, or otherwise being deceptive to cover up her nosey activities, it took her no less than five seconds to put herself in an innocent position and create a passable excuse.

The footsteps outside came closer- and then went past Alphonse's room. They thunked down the stairs, and Miss Schmidt heard a door open and shut.

Miss Schmidt stood in the middle of the room and relished in the relief of not being caught, but then this relief melted into confusion. She started to take a step forward, stopped herself, and stepped back into the centre of the room.

Something was wrong. She frowned and turned a full circle, her brown eyes wandering over every part of his room. She had heard the footsteps go down to Adam's room, so either he and Alphonse were having a moonlight tryst, or-

His boots were missing.

Miss Schmidt swore and tore out of his room to find her dressing-gown and mud boots.

_000_

Richard slid his eyes open, and in the first few seconds of disorientation before he fully woke up, he thought he saw his wife pulling on his mud-boots at- what, nine o'clock in the evening?

He blinked a few times. Checked the clock.

Huh. His wife really was pulling his mud-boots on at nine o'clock in the evening.

"What're you doing, dear?"

She affixed him with a wide-eyed stare. "Alphonse didn't come home, and it's been hours."

He blinked a few times. "But, we heard him come in after dinnertime-"

"It was that mutt you've been feeding. I found it sleeping on the kitchen with Al's leftover dinner scraps on the floor." His wife applied a rather forceful tug to his leather mud-boots, and the boots finally pulled up around her ankle. "I told you to stop feeding it."

"You're going out in your dressing-gown?" He blinked a few times. "It's nine o'clock in the evening."

"We've established that, Richard. That's why I'm worried." She tightened her iron-grey chignon and gave him a sharp-eyed once-over. "Go back to bed, you're clearly not in thinking condition."

He blinked a few times. "Dear-"

"I'll see you in a bit. Oh, before you go back to bed, do tell Adam to put on a pot of lemon tea. Alphonse might need it."

He blinked a few more times, and his wife strode out of their room in only her nightdress and dressing-gown. He definitely married a scary lady, but she could get things done if she put her mind to it.

He fell back asleep before he could tell Adam to put a pot of lemon tea on.

_000_

Miss Schmidt was not a tall woman. Miss Schmidt did not have long legs. She'd be damned if she hadn't run like she did towards the Rockbell house, in only her dressing-gown and her husband's too-big mud-boots.

The lights were off, and this was not a good sign.

She clattered up the steps and pounded her fists onto the door.

"Alphonse!" She punctuated this with three more pounds on the door. "Alphonse!" Her voice was uncharacteristically shrill.

She fumbled at the doorknob and rattled it to find it was locked. She fell to her knees and ran her hands under the Rockbell's welcome mat for their not-so-secret secret house key. Her hands shoved the key and the lock and turned it. The moment she felt the lock click, she pushed the door open, and almost immediately felt it hit something soft.

She winced and peeked around the door.

Alphonse was unconscious on the floor, expression completely slack and a door jammed into his head.

"Sun and moon above-" She exclaimed. Miss Schmidt grasped him by his shoulders and shook him a little. When this didn't work, she started patting his cheek, gently at first, and then she was almost slapping him. "Alphonse!"

He wasn't injured, as far as she could tell, and no one had hit him in the head. There'd be a painful lump, and her probing fingers had yet to find one.

"Alphonse Elric!" She shook him again. His head lolled on his shoulders like a ragdoll. Miss Schmidt's internal monologue had become one consisting entirely of swearing and/or prayers, as well as a crash course in the first-aid knowledge she had studied when the Bytyl-Kotleyeva conflict had reached its fever pitch.

"Breathing, breathing-yes, alright." Miss Schmidt ran through a quick list. "Roll him on his side? Yes, I think so? No, his back- no, his side."

Miss Schmidt _thought_ he looked better when she rolled him on his side, but that could've been the anxiety talking. "Warmth! Oh no, I'm only in my- _stupid_ , of course she would have _blankets_! Blankets! Yes!"

She made sure Alphonse wasn't going to roll off like a runaway horse-cart and dashed upstairs.

"Find the linen cabinet! Everything will be fine, Schmidt, keep it together- ah-hah!" Gathering an entire wicker basket (more of a great wicker cave, really) of quilts and those strange, puffy Cretan blankets Winry had a soft spot for.

She clumped down the stairs as quickly as she could with a basket a metre square taking up most of her view. Only when a quiet voice said, "Hello, Miss Schmidt," did she realise that Alphonse had awoken during her expedition into the upper floors of the house.

She peeked around the mass of blankets and quilts to see Alphonse, head on his knees and arms around his legs, staring right at her with a bizarre look on his face.

"How long have I been here?" He asked flatly. Ah, that was what it was. His bizarre look wasn't a _look_ , but rather the lack of one.

"I…" She hesitated before setting the blankets on the floor and kneeling by his side. "It's-" she glanced at the clock nailed to the wall in the foyer, "-a half-hour to ten o'clock, now."

"Seven hours."

"Yes, yes, but Alphonse, do you feel dizzy? Disoriented?" She took in his hollow eyes, and the way he wouldn't meet her gaze. "...did something-"

"No."

"Are you-"

"I'm fine, Mrs. Schmidt. Thank you for being concerned."

Miss Schmidt frowned. Hm.

She hesitated, but then held out her hand. Alphonse lifted his hand, and it hovered in the air for a moment, before meeting hers. She stood up and hauled Alphonse to his feet along with her.

"You must've... been overwhelmed. This place has a lot of memories for you. Come along, Richard's probably worried sick- watch your step- Adam's put a pot of tea on. I'll make you some dinner."

Alphonse nodded, but kept staring at his feet. All the way down to the Schmidt's house, he didn't look her in the eye even once.

_000_

Miss Schmidt didn't notice the gouges in the floor.

She bustled him inside and settled him at their scrubbed kitchen table, muttering about doing everything in their house. She clicked on the radio for a late-night broadcast while busying herself at the stove.

The radio crackled to life. The voices coming from it were tinny and indistinct- you didn't have many radio stations out here in the sticks.

"-factory explosion in Crotogusca, a border town near Aruego, has left the entire city in ruins. No bodies have been recovered. Officials say it would be too dangerous to excavate the rubble at this time. The factory's company is currently under investigation for negligence of safety codes. A national day of mourning is set for the first of September. In other news, diplomatic correspondence with the Emperor of Xing has been brought to a standstill, as he has disappeared right under the diplomat's noses. Along with him is his personal guard, Lan-Fan Fu, a vassal-retainer of the Yao clan. Xing officers are scrambling to find him. Last year, he…"

The news faded into the background. So, Ling had run off again? Maybe Al would meet him somewhere while he was researching.

Al couldn't even manage a snort. His bank account wouldn't be able to hold the strain of supporting that Emperor's eating habits.

The corner of Alphonse's mouth twitched downward. Making attempts at humour wasn't going to help.

Al's eyes followed Miss Schmidt around the kitchen as she rattled about- opening cabinets and shutting them, opening drawers and leaving them out. After one last look around, she plunked an open-face sandwich, cold boiled potatoes, and cold lemon tea in front of him and instructed him to eat.

Even looking at food made Alphonse nauseous, but Miss Schmidt was watching him. He forced down a nibble of the sandwich. It went down tasting like dirt.

"I'm going to be leaving in the morning," He said.

Miss Schmidt paused before sitting down. "Is a train coming tomorrow?"

"They run one once a week." Alphonse speared a potato and bit off a quarter. "I'll start packing, I really have overstayed my welcome."

"Oh Alphonse," She said. "No, no, no, you haven't."

"It's alright. I need to get going anyway. I'm behind on my research."

She took in a small breath. "Into…homunculi."

Alphonse registered the hesitation and glanced up. Miss Schmidt was looking at the floor with a slightly pinched expression. Alphonse felt his shoulders sag.

She cleared her throat. "So, where are you researching?"

"Central City." Alphonse sipped some cooling tea.

"Central City! Ah. Bring all of us some fancy souvenirs back. Margaret was absolutely raving about the…what was it?"

Alphonse felt a wave of nausea building up inside. He was overcome by a sudden desire to be anywhere but in this kitchen, with Miss Schmidt trying to make conversation about Central City.

"What do you think, Alphonse?"

Alphonse forced a watery smile.

Suddenly, a disgusting memory shot across his mind, and he felt his stomach heave. He flung himself up the stairs into the bathroom, leaving an upset chair and a confused Miss Schmidt behind.

_000_

"Pity." Lust sighed. She flicked a limp finger, hanging off of the table and dripping. "Which one was this?"

Pride consulted the sheaf of paper next to him. "5C."

"Maybe we should be a tad more selective in our choosings." Lust frowned. "These ones don't seem to be taking so well."

"They're all we have at this moment." Pride answered. "Unless you have an idea."

"I have plenty, but you won't hear it."

"...I _don't know_ where he is."

"Not _him_ , numbskull." Lust countered off-handedly, standing.

Pride's immediately crimson eyes snapped to Lust, narrowing dangerously. All of the shadows around her gained a sharp edge. She didn't flinch, but her crossed arms tightened, almost imperceptibly.

"Think. Pride is a powerful motivator...Edward."

His trembling hands tightened around the seat of the chair. Widened golden eyes stared unblinkingly at the limp body on the table.


	11. Identity

Morning light slowly tinged the sky a watery, dawn-lit grey. Alphonse had not yet fallen asleep, curled up into a little rumpled corner of the bedsheets with his knees hugged to his chest, hands clutched tight enough his knuckles were white. The storm clouds hanging low in the sky slowly lightened as hours passed in near-silence, the grandfather clock down the hall the only sound, besides his breathing, that he could hear.

Somewhere around half past five, Mr. Schmidt started snuffling and coughing downstairs. His feet shuffled to the bathroom, and the door shut. A quarter till six, Mrs. Schmidt awoke. He heard her go into the kitchen and softly clink pots together. Around six o'clock, Adam awoke, groaned, and went silent again. Alphonse still sat in the corner between two walls, listening to the sound of the waking countryside around him. Sheep began to bleat. He heard the far-off neighbour's rooster squawk at the arrival of day. The smells of breakfast drifted upstairs, and he felt his empty stomach give a hopeful growl, then a nauseous lurch at the idea of food.

Al's eyes were glazed and staring. Even when Mrs. Schmidt called "Alphonse! Adam! Breakfast!", he didn't react.

Footsteps thumped up the stairs, and his door opened. "Mornin', Al. It's breakfast time, if you want to come on down." Mr. Schmidt's deep, gruff voice said.

Al shook his head and clutched his knees to his chest even tighter. "I'm not hungry."

There was a short silence.

"Are you alright, kid?"

Alphonse almost shook his head, but some rising lump in his throat forced him to nod, meet Mr. Schmidt's warm, dark eyes. "I'll eat on the train."

Mr. Schmidt shrugged and closed the door. Alphonse leaned back against the wall, beginning to shake, all colour in his face flushed out to grey.

The first sprinkle of rain hit the window pane.

_000_

 _Central City, Central Command_

It was raining. This wasn't a wimpy little sprinkle, or anything of that sort. This was a torrential downpour, rain lashing at the windows with startling ferocity and noise. The office was tinged grey in the silence, desks empty and one conspicuously void of any paper, phones, or pens.

Roy Mustang sat with his back to the window, staring at the rest of his empty office. It was seven in the morning, and no one would be here until at least half past eight, and Roy enjoyed the silence. He'd been up since four o'clock, staring listlessly at the ceiling in his bedroom until he gave up and got ready for the day.

He hadn't been able to sleep a full night for the past few months. He hadn't been able to bring himself to relax or have downtime for the past few months.

Roy thumbed the rotary dial of the telephone on his desk, watching it spin around back to 1 over and over again, without picking up the receiver. His desk was empty. He had finished yesterday's work already, and had begun on today's without a single nag from Hawkeye.

Out of nowhere, the telephone rang. Roy nearly jumped out of his skin, fumbling with the receiver until he finally got a grip on it and held it up to his ear.

"Good morning, you've reached Colonel Mustang of Central Command."

"Oh, Mr. Mustang. Hi." The man on the other end of the line sounded surprised that he had even picked up. Roy could understand that, as he was surprised at himself for being somewhere other than his bed at seven o'clock in the morning, but it was steadily becoming habit.

Roy waited for a name, but got none. All he heard was the hissing and crackling of the line in his ear and an awkward silence. "...hello?"

"It's me?" The other man said.

Roy squinted. "I'm not sure I know what you mean, sir. Can you give me your name?"

"Mr. Mustang, it's Alphonse."

Roy raised an eyebrow. This couldn't be Alphonse- no, yes, it definitely was. It was unmistakably Alphonse. He decided he would blame this mistake on the early morning. "Oh - hey, kid. Sorry. Your voice has gotten a little deeper."

"Really?"

Roy had a feeling that Alphonse should've sounded more excited about that fact, but brushed it off and smiled gently. "Do you have any special reason for calling this early?"

"Er, yeah." Roy heard some shuffling. "I just wanted to tell you that I'm going to be coming up to Central at around nine o'clock, and…"

"What was that last part?"

"I was wondering if I could-" Al cleared his throat. "I was wondering if I could come get some of his stuff."

Roy froze. His gentle smile faded, and he stopped rubbing the cuff of the jacket hung over the back of his chair in favor of switching the receiver to his other ear. "Oh." Roy shook himself and turned toward the window. "Sure you can. Just pop on by and I'll take you up to your old barracks. We always put the stuff you two left behind up there."

"Okay." His reply was flat and lifeless.

Roy's mouth thinned, his brows furrowing slightly. "...do you want to see Riza while you're here?"

There was a short silence. Some creaking came from behind Roy."Maybe. I don't know."

"That's fine. Just tell me when you decide."

There was a longer silence. "Thank you, Mr. Mustang."

"That's no problem, kiddo."

Roy watched the rain drip down the window pane, listening to the crackle and hiss in his ear. He could practically hear the distance.

"Goodbye, Colonel."

"See you later, Al."

Roy heard a click. He sighed deeply, turning to put the phone back on the receiver.

Hawkeye was leaning up against the door jamb, arms tightly crossed and eyes downcast. Roy cleared his throat, saying, "Good morning, Lieutenant."

Hawkeye jerked up into an arrow-straight stance, saluting neatly*, like a coil bouncing back from being stretched. "Good morning, sir."

Roy nodded, and Hawkeye dropped her salute.

"Was that Alphonse on the phone?" He saw her move to her desk, setting down the files that had been tucked tightly under her arm.

"Mm-hm." Roy said. His brow creased.

"Did he need something important?"

Roy looked up at Hawkeye, taking in the hollows that had been formed under her eyes for months now, the slight stringiness to her hair, the concern set into the thin line of her mouth. "He wanted to come retrieve Ed- …. Fullmetal's belongings."

Hawkeye's hands froze on her desk. She straightened her posture, gaze never erring from Roy's face. "I...he…" She cleared her throat and brought her hands back to her sides. "Do you wish for me to escort him to the barracks?"

"No, I'll do it."

"Sir?"

"I've already finished quite a bit of my work today. It's the least I can do for him."

Hawkeye still had a look of concern twisting her features. She sighed, and her wall of professionalism cracked. "...will he be alright?"

Roy broke eye contact to shut his eyes and hunch over his desk, fists clenched on its surface. "I don't know, Lieutenant."

Weak thunder echoed in the distant hills.

_000_

260 kilometers away, Alphonse put the telephone back on its stand on the wall. He shut his eyes tight and sighed deeply, steeling himself to exit the station-master's office and face Miss Schmidt, who was sheltering from the rain under the station's awning.

Miss Schmidt leapt up from the bench the moment the door to the station-master's office opened. A smile that didn't quite reach her eyes came across her face.

"The train is almost here." She said, adjusting his shirt collar.

"Hmm." Al replied. He didn't meet her eyes.

"Are you going to be alright, dear?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"And you're going to be fine on your own in a big city like Central?"

"I have been before, Miss Schmidt."

Miss Schmidt's face was drawn and pale. She dropped her hands from his shirt collar and fisted them in the wrinkled fabric of her day-skirts, knuckles blanching. "I know you're quite convinced about the… monster debacle, but I can promise that you will be alright. Hysteria can do many things to a young mind."

Just as the train whistle sounded, rounding the corner, Al's eyes snapped up to meet Miss Schmidt's watery, brown ones, hers set deep into an aging face and lined with worry. "Be careful, Miss Schmidt. I mean it."

The rattling got louder as the train pulled into the station. Miss Schmidt glanced at the train, back at Al, and pulled him into a bone-crushing embrace. "And I mean this: if I find out you've gone and gotten yourself hurt because you didn't obey my words, you will have hell to answer to when you get back. Do you understand, young man?"

Al's hands were frozen at his sides. They slowly crept up to lace around Miss Schmidt's waist and Al melted into the hug, eyes shutting tight and brow creasing in an effort to cover the stinging. "Yes, ma'am." _Thank you, for everything._

"Now, go. I don't want you to miss it." _God, please come back soon._

It took a herculean effort to separate from Miss Schmidt. He boarded the train with hands trembling on the handle of his suitcase, and didn't look back until Resembool had disappeared behind the foothills. The blue shadows of snow-capped mountains followed him for much longer, until they, too, disappeared in the haze of morning storms.

_000_

Mr. Mustang was waiting for him outside Central Station. He was leaning against the outer wall, black coat thrown over his uniform to protect it from the rain, and a peaked cap pulled low over his head.

"Hello, Colonel."

Mr. Mustang started a little. He left the wall and opened his arms halfway, hesitated for a moment, and decided to extend a hand to Alphonse. "Good morning, Al. I almost didn't recognize you."

Al shook his hand once, noting that he had no gloves on.

"Come along, the car's waiting for us." Mr. Mustang beckoned with one finger for Al to follow him to an innocuous black car idling a few steps away.

When the doors shut, all street and rain noises cut out. He and Mr. Mustang were sitting alone, silent, in the car. Al reached into his trouser pocket and rubbed at the corners of a half-finished letter to Teacher, its paper already soft and corners rounded from weeks of editing.

"To the barracks?" Mr. Mustang said, fingers tapping on the steering wheel. He regarded Alphonse with a strange, appraising look in his eye.

Al nodded.

They drove in silence for most of the journey. Al could see Mr. Mustang glancing at him out of the corner of his eye the entire way. He just continued to stare out the rain-speckled windshield.

Mr. Mustang made sure to keep his umbrella over Alphonse's head all the way into the barracks. Inside, the tall windows of the ground floor were letting in grey, rainy light, dappled and shadowed by the trees outside and the raindrops hitting the window. It was a sight to see, watching the grey light of mid-morning shift and warp on the wood floors.

"It's room 3-16." Mr. Mustang said, leading the way up the rickety staircase to the upper levels.

"I remember." Al replied. His hand traced the splintery, tarnished wooden banister all the way up the third floor.

Inside their old room, everything was dusty, the air thick with a feeling of disuse. The beds were neatly made. Throw pillows on the second-hand sofa were neatly stacked. The coffee table had a thin layer of dust that Al ran a finger through, the pad of it coming back grey.

"Ergh," Al muttered, wiping it on his trousers.

"Just look around," Mr. Mustang said, gesturing to the entire room. "I'm sure it's all over."

Al nodded and shedded his jacket onto the back of the sofa. As he cast his gaze over the room, a heavy wooden trunk caught his eye. He made his way over and heaved open the lid. A cloud of dust plumed out into Al's face. He flapped his hands in his face to disperse the dust, coughing.

There were the usual things; some books, some notebooks, spare boots. Al set those aside- he knew the only information in there pertained to the philosopher's stone, which was quite useless to him now. After taking out a few more heavy pairs of boots, Al saw a slightly dusty expanse of red fabric. He rubbed it between two fingers, feeling the coarse weave. He grasped the fabric in two fists and yanked it out of the trunk.

His breath froze in his lungs. Mr. Mustang poorly smothered a sharp intake of breath behind him. He could feel his knees shake.

Swaying in his tight grip was his brother's coat. It was still torn and bloodied from the battle back in May, and had gone untouched after it had been shoved in this trunk. He recognized the familiar flamel symbol just inches from his nose.

His eyes began to sting. He could smell it, a slight staleness of being shoved in a trunk for months, and the faint, earthy smell of a human. That must be what Brother had smelled like.

His knees started to give out and he heavily leant against the back of the sofa, coat still held in a vice-like grip. Memories upon memories kept flashing across his mind- this coat, flying in the wind, Al close behind; this coat, soaked with blood, its owner gasping for breath and collapsed onto the flagstones of an unfamiliar street; this coat, the right sleeve limp, as they trekked up a familiar hill; this coat, clenched between mismatched hands as its owner admired his handiwork with a determined glint in his eye; this coat, yanked over broadening shoulders in a train car; this coat, a flash of red in a nightmarish dream of flat eyes and echoing voices; this coat, a golden braid trailing over the hood, golden eyes looking back at him, teasing.

A sob ripped its way out of Al's chest. His face was burning and his eyes screwed up into little slits as hot, wet tears splotched the red fabric. He crumpled the coat in his grip and brought it up to press it to his face, an attempt to staunch his tears. A hollow ache in his chest clawed at his throat. The walls that Al had put up had once again been crumbled to pieces.

Out of nowhere, strong arms wrapped around Al, pulling him into a tight embrace. Al hiccupped and leant into this somewhat fatherly hold, another human's heartbeat slowing his sobs. He could be mistaken, but he thought he could hear Mr. Mustang shushing him, like...like an infant.

Al pulled away from Mr. Mustang and wiped his face on his shirt's sleeve.

Mr. Mustang's arms were still hovering in the air when Al looked back up. He gazed at Al with furrowed brows and shining, concerned black eyes.

"I-I'm sorry," Al hiccoughed. The coat scrunched even tighter in his hands.

Mr. Mustang shook his head. He opened his mouth to say something, reconsidered, and shut it again. He leant away from Al, watching him run his hands down the worn fabric.

Al rubbed the long tears and stains on the coat, frowning at a particularly wide one which marred the flamel symbol. He softly clapped his hands together, and pressed one to the back panel. Bright blue light bloomed around his hands and lightning crackled through the room, leaving the stench of ozone and putting hair on end. Quicker than it had come, the light disappeared. The coat now held in Al's hands was almost as pristine as the day Ed had created it from a single bolt of fabric.

"Alphonse?" Mr. Mustang asked. "Kiddo?"

Alphonse continued to stare at the coat in his hands.

He was so alone. Without his brother, he felt like a piece of him was missing. He was hollow in places that he shouldn't be.

Who was he without the Fullmetal Alchemist?

Ask anyone on the street, and Alphonse was the sweet but outwardly frightening kid brother of the hero of the people. Ask someone close to him, and he was the selfless, kind, cool-tempered brother of Edward Elric.

He was his own person. He knew this. Then why did so much of his identity depend on his brother? How much of him lived in his brother's shadow?

Alphonse shrugged the coat over his shoulders. He felt the coarse weave slide over his shirt collar and brush the backs of his knees through his slacks. He caught his reflection in an age-spotted mirror propped against the wall.

There he stood, his brother's coat draped over a still unfamiliar reflection, looking incomplete without a black shirt underneath, or tacky trousers, or the scent and stains of automail oil smudged on the sleeves. He reached up to touch his face, shaking hands tracing a shared nose shape, the same sharp jaw, ghosting over the eyelids of similar golden eyes, running through short, wheat-blond strands.

Roy Mustang continued to stare at him. Now, concern was even more present as he watched Alphonse run his hands down the length of Ed's coat.

"Alphonse?"

"What's wrong, Mustang?" Al said, finally meeting his eyes.

Roy Mustang saw the fragile glass behind Al's gaze. It was cracking and threatening to shatter at any moment, an emotion Roy was afraid of understanding lapping at the broken parts, a cold, dark winter river against a paper-thin dam.

"Nothing," Roy said. "There's more around here if you want to keep looking."

Al nodded and turned away.

The rain broke through the silence.

_000_

"Do you want to see Elicia and Gracia?"

"Not like this."

"Okay."

_000_

Sixty kilometers away, a silver pocketwatch swung on a sturdy silver chain from the fingers of a teenage boy. He glared at it with oddly dull-looking eyes, a scowl gracing his already sharp features.

He watched it go back and forth like a pendulum. The lamps in the room cast a golden glow onto its tarnished metal as it swung. The clicking of clockwork inside the watch was gone, and had been for weeks now. It was of no use to him now, of course, but he couldn't figure out why he didn't want to get rid of it. Every time, something stopped him.

He snatched it back to his chest in the middle of its swing.

_000_

[A/N]

Hey you guys. It's been a year. I'm a year thiccer, a year more experienced, and year more tired of the political climate of the united states of america. What's good? How's it all been for the past year?

I was so excited to get this chapter out to you that i finished in like, a day. Keep in mind that updates probably won't be regular, as this fic is not a priority of mine. I'll update when I can.

If net neutrality truly does get repealed, I will try my best to update as much as I can between that and all of the legislation being put in place. Please contact your reps, dear Jesus. This cannot happen.

I hope you guys can tell that I've improved my writing since then. I also hope that Al isn't completely out of character, because I haven't watched FMAB for at least a year and a half. Please tell me what you think of this new chapter! I'm so glad to be writing this again.

Please have a good week. Happy holidays!


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